I’ve rewritten this post about 5 times over 3 months. To write about Style must be one of the hardest things. I always refer back to my favourite Picasso quote. “God invented the giraffe, the elephant, the cat… He has no real Style. He just goes on trying things.” The great thing about having a definable style as a photographer is that it’s much easier to market yourself. People know you’re product. There’s a definable element in the photographs that people can recognize immediately. Maybe they’re huge composite scenes that you shoot. Maybe it’s the happy smiley sports lifestyle shots that is your main style, or the soft out of focus street scenes. But having just a definable style is restrictive, it’s difficult to evolve, to learn. Experimenting is this the only to improve your work. Often I’ve also thought that there should be a separation between my professional ‘commercial’ work, and my personal photography or travel photos. You can see that in the way I’ve setup my portfolio website which has very different work to this blog. But often I’m commissioned to shoot based on the shots clients have seen of my roadtrips or pictures I’ve taken of my friends on Facebook. I get vastly different reactions from new ideas or test shoots. When seeing my ‘Beauty & Water’ shoot, a close friend told me that I shouldn’t have shot that, “It’s totally not your style”.

Fashion photographer Poalo Roversi says, “Your photographic style comes from your creative expression, from your aesthetic, from the beauty that you can bring to the image, the emotion that you can give to the people who are looking at your work”. But I think you can only really attribute a style to somebody’s work by looking back over a decade or two of shoots. Style is perhaps retrospective. For now, I have a work in progress definition. A style is they way you work with people and incorporate new ideas and influences. It’s your perspective, a photographers point of view. A style is your approach to your work, how you try new things, and how you manage an initial idea to create something beautiful in the final artwork. A style is possibly not intrinsic to your work but intrinsic to your personality.