Are you frustrated with your photography and looking for your own style?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you just “clicked” into your own style and suddenly knew what to take photos of and how to take them?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work like that…
If photography is your hobby, then don’t rush this. You may enjoy taking photos, but then you’re disappointed looking at the results, or you love tinkering on your computer and creating different effects on your images.
This is all good and part of the journey.
Finding your own photography style can take years—even decades—for some. And some photographers never find it, and that’s OK, too.
Not finding your style or not having a particular photography style doesn’t mean you’re a lousy photographer. It only means you’re trying out many different things. You can go down one rabbit hole for a few weeks, months or years only to drop it and then try something else.
The frustration you feel is a good thing because it keeps you going. Without it, you’d become complacent, and your photos would no longer improve.
I am a big believer that you cannot find your style, but your style will find you.
When I worked as a wedding photographer, I was desperate to have my own style.
As an artist—especially in the beginning—you will copy many other artists/photographers. You might love how they take the images or how they edit them.
The copy process is part of every artist’s journey. Look at musicians – they play other musicians’ music for years before attempting to compose or put their own spin on a well-known classical piece.
This is OK – nobody “owns” a particular photography style. And if there’s another photographer nearby who takes photos similar to yours, that’s OK too.
Don’t feel threatened if other photographers go to the same location where you took a particular photo or edit their images in a style similar to yours. This is also a form of flattery – they may have seen something in your pictures that spoke to them, and now they’re trying to emulate your images. They are on their journey, too.
Don’t chase your style. Your style will find you.
This is true for me too. I started taking part in online trainings that improved my editing and also my photography. I learnt about posing and what to focus on on the wedding day. Buy learning from many different photographers, I eventually arrived at my own style. I was a natural light photographer with a bright and airy style, while maintaining natural colours.
Here you can clearly see that my style was all over the place. Some images have a yellow tint and I used vignetting.
I re-edited this wedding years later when had found my style and now it’s a coherent set of images.
The Pinterest exercise to finding a style you love
Pinterest is not social media.
Pinterest is a search engine for images that allows you to save your favourite finds on “Pinterest boards”. Pinterest user numbers are still growing. In the 3rd quarter of 2024, Pinterest had 537 million monthly active users!
You can search for anything on Pinterest and create different boards, such as street photography, macro photography, green photography, or foggy photography—anything you want!
Then, search for images that truly inspire you and put them into the different boards. You will quickly see what you’re most drawn to!
Then go out and start creating images that are similar to the ones you love.
Using Lightroom presets for your editing
Usually, a certain photography style is accompanied by a particular way of editing your images. If you’re new to image editing, I’d recommend you learn how to edit in Adobe Lightroom. Most professional photographers use Lightroom over Adobe Photoshop.
Photoshop is amazing for amending invidiual images, remove blemishes etc. However, if you have a “body of work” – a gallery – and you want to create a uniform outlook, Lightroom makes it so much easier to achieve this.
You can also edit one photo with all sorts of settings and then you can simply copy all settings in one click and apply them to the next image and it will be edited in the same way.
Presets are also a wonderful way to apply a certain editing style to your images.
There are always trends going around and it’s fun to try them out. You will find presets online for moody images, woodland images, cold images, sunset scenes, the world is your oyster!
Lightroom presets are super easy to use and they’re usually cheap to buy, too.
Here are a few websites where you can buy presets from:
Check out this little gallery below. The first image is the original image. Then each following image has a preset applied – I simply clicked on a button and the image was transformed with the preset settings.
Keep taking photos
You can only develop your style by taking more photos. Keep going out, get lost on location, explore a certain area and then study your photos.
Try to copy other artists and their style. Go to the same locations – the conditions will likely be different – and then create your own interpretation.
Don’t stress about finding your style. Give your art time to develop.
