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Author Topic: Do you have a "photographic style"?  (Read 87276 times)

jjj

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #120 on: July 01, 2015, 09:25:38 am »

How do you come to that conclusion?
Because Russ.  ::)
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jjj

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #121 on: July 01, 2015, 09:30:37 am »

Strikes me that if you're trying to get a distinctive appearance or look you're not really trying to get a photograph; you're trying to create a "style."
Why are you so determined to prove that photography and style are mutually exclusive?
They are not no matter how often you say it by the way.
You are like a blind person shouting that there is no such thing as the colour green.

« Last Edit: July 01, 2015, 09:32:33 am by jjj »
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jjj

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #122 on: July 01, 2015, 09:34:34 am »

I think "a distinctive appearance or look" is perfectly OK. It's a definition, for sure.

Can I now answer questions about "style"? Let's try out some of the usual questions, and see if the answers become more obvious:

How can I get a distinctive appearance or look for myself?
Can I identify an artist from the distinctive appearance or look in the work?
How does one develop a distinctive appearance or look?
Is a distinctive appearance or look the same as a technique?
Style should not be confused with uniqueness. Which some posters seem to be alluding.
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amolitor

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #123 on: July 01, 2015, 10:09:50 am »

Whatever you call it, people can and do make bodies of work, collections of photographs, which are visually related in ways that strengthen the work.

I do this by doing certain things the same way from photo to photo across the collection.
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Some Guy

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #124 on: July 01, 2015, 10:31:37 am »

I can spot some people's work by their style.  Example would be Robert Alvarado and his pinup work, saturated color, and white backgrounds.  It's his signature and style, and pretty unique too.  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Robert-Alvarado-Photographer/162114487181780  People attempt to copy his style, but there is just something in the posing and setting that makes his work easy to pick out.

Sometimes consistently doing a style leads to being in a rut though, and maybe why some burn out too.  I knew the owners of a baby photo mill in a mall and they burned out quick.  Too much of same thing and that's all they could take.  Some wedding pros shoot the same style, and almost identical shots for each wedding event too, almost a style rut.

Ansel Adams had a style, but he could never break out from it and do portraiture work well as it was awful when he tried.  Probably couldn't translate landscape and zone system to headshots and got too wrapped up in the technical style verse trying to get his subjects personality to emote.  Landscapes seem to emote differently for the technical people, and much in post work is done to make them emote like using HDR, etc., which is a style for some.

SG
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jjj

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #125 on: July 01, 2015, 03:43:26 pm »

Ansel Adams had a style, but he could never break out from it and do portraiture work well as it was awful when he tried.  Probably couldn't translate landscape and zone system to headshots and got too wrapped up in the technical style verse trying to get his subjects personality to emote.  Landscapes seem to emote differently for the technical people, and much in post work is done to make them emote like using HDR, etc., which is a style for some.
Being good at one kind of photography doesn't necessarily mean you can do others. Portrait photography is more about people skills than camera skills. Plus I'd say a more creative bent is needed too, as often you are creating the entire scene from scratch as opposed to capturing what is already there.  Much easier for a good portrait shooter to transition to do landscapes than the other way around I'd say.
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RSL

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #126 on: July 01, 2015, 04:06:47 pm »

Why are you so determined to prove that photography and style are mutually exclusive?

I guess you're right, Jeremy. I probably shouldn't say that. Actually, photographs have a style. They all look exactly like photographs.
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jjj

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #127 on: July 01, 2015, 04:12:51 pm »

Still being patronising I see. But I guess it's all you have left when your bizarre point of view has run out of woffle and rejigging of the English language.

 
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RSL

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #128 on: July 01, 2015, 06:16:02 pm »

It's okay, Jeremy. You're keeping me entertained.
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Russ Lewis  www.russ-lewis.com.

amolitor

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #129 on: July 01, 2015, 08:58:54 pm »

Russ, do you have a word you prefer for "That thing where a bunch of photos in a collection are clearly visually related"?
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #130 on: July 01, 2015, 09:37:26 pm »

Russ, do you have a word you prefer for "That thing where a bunch of photos in a collection are clearly visually related"?
I think his word (or two) is "Street Photography."    ;D
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RSL

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #131 on: July 01, 2015, 09:53:15 pm »

Hi Andrew,

I guess in response I'd first ask what makes the collection a collection. I'd suspect the main reason the collection is a collection is that the photos are visually related. For instance, I made a book on the Manitou Springs Penny Arcade. The pictures are related because they're all about the Penny Arcade. But I don't think they represent a style. I think they represent a collection.

Let's go back to painting for a moment. Renoir and Monet worked together at La Grenouillere on essentially the same subjects with very different results. The results came from a difference in style. That difference in style persisted and the work of both is easily identified by what I'd call style.

Jeremy has a point: that others were able, more rather than less, to copy various painters styles, but the styles they were copying were, in fact, styles. The copies were copies.

I think what you see in the work at La Grenouillere is something that has no parallel in photography. And it's what I'd call "style."
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amolitor

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #132 on: July 01, 2015, 10:24:18 pm »

Go over, for instance, to sallymann.com. CLick on Selected Works and click on, say, Southern Landscapes, or Proud Flesh.

These are collections which are tied together quite tightly. There's subject matter, there's the way she's framing the subject matter, there's materials and technical methods, there's the way she's arranging forms in the frame, and probably half a dozen things I am missing. Each collection, well, each of the *later* ones, has a pretty clearly developed set of things she is doing The Same Way within the collection, which things generally speaking not only tie one photo to the next, but also support and clarify the thing she's going for in the body of work.

It's pretty quintessentially the thing I try feebly to do.

I call it style, but that's just a word. It's a very definite thing, whatever you choose to call it.
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RSL

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #133 on: July 02, 2015, 02:01:56 pm »

I'm familiar with Sally's work, Andrew. It's interesting stuff, though I'll confess I don't particularly like it. I think the point is that if you take one of Sally's photographs out of a collection, there's really nothing there that tells you it's a Sally. On the other hand, if I take a Renoir away from a Renoir collection it's still clearly Renoir.

But I think you hit the nail on the head with your last sentence. "Style" is just a word. As was the case with Humpty Dumpty, the word always means exactly what the user of the word intends it to mean, no more and no less.

To go back to something I said earlier: It strikes me that if you're trying to develop a "style" you probably are concentrating more on that than on the individual photographs you're setting out to shoot. Did HCB have a "style?" I don't know the answer to that. He certainly had an eye for composition, but so do many other photographers. He produced a body of work that's very wonderful, but I can't really see a thread of commonality in it I'd call a "style," at least not in the same sense I see a style in Monet's work.

But then I come to the bottom line: What difference does it make? The guy's work was excellent. He doesn't need to have had a "style."
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amolitor

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Re: Do you have a "photographic style"?
« Reply #134 on: July 02, 2015, 02:09:16 pm »

I'm assuming that Sally works roughly the way I do, which is groping around in the dark a lot.

I feel like I want to record something, to say something about.. an object, a scene, an idea. So I take some pictures and try stuff out. After a while, if I'm lucky, something gels. Usually some sort of list of things like the following seem to me to be good for what I am trying to do.

- a set of materials to use
- an approach (literally) to the subject - how I frame it, where I put the camera
- some notion of how to render the final pictures (contrast, color, cropping, whatever)

This is somewhat fluid, and may not really fully settle down until the project is fully shot.

All this creates a commonality of appearance, or at least some sort of flow. They don't always look the *same*, there might instead be a progression or something. But there's flow and connection, one photo to the next, once the curation and editing is complete.

But it begins with groping around almost at random, for a subject, for an idea, for the materials, for the visual idioms, that are going to come together.

You definitely CANNOT recognize my work from a single picture. You might from the finished product, but that mainly because it's in some handmade book thing full or murky photos.

Is the word "style" applicable in here someplace? Well, the way I use it, sure. What relationship does that have with, say, Rembrandt's "style"? I dunno. I do know that as a photographer I have the luxury of changing stuff up to suit my mood and the subject or whatever I like, as often as I like. Rembrandt had less scope for this purely on the grounds that paintings take a long time.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 02:13:48 pm by amolitor »
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