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Finding Vision and Style

Focus, Simplicity, Color

Seems like we have neglected the blog in recent months as life has absorbed most of our energy and time, however, in a reinvigorated effort we are going to get this ship righted and be a bit more consistent with content.

I find myself lately wondering what it is that makes a photo great. Why do some photos demand your attention? Is it the beautiful scenery? A captured touching moment? Or the presentation of nature’s wonderment? I feel like the answer to this question is a critical component in the understanding of my own photography. If you are like myself, you have been on several photo outings from which you return and are only moderately satisfied with what you have captured. So I have spent a lot of time lately perusing different photo sharing sites, finding images that I like or dislike and spending some time figuring out for myself what it is that I find most intriguing or detrimental. The overall goal of this exercise being to improve my own photography by understanding my own vision and emotional connection to these images so that I can begin to focus my efforts and improve my own work.

After looking at probably thousands of images, I found three consistent features that seem to ignite my own photo mojo:

1) Focus
2) Simplicity
3) Color

I have to admit I was a little taken aback by this exercise. I was strangely surprised to find out that the process I went through ended with these three elements. These resonating factors really cut to the core of my developing photographic vision. I simply was trying to just get a feel for my likes and dislikes and ended up with a strong uniting creative theme for my own work. Now in every aspect of my photography, from pre-planning of a shot all the way through capture and post-processing, I consider these factors and make sure that my final product is an amalgamation of these self-defining elements.

I highly recommended this process to anyone interested in photography to help you understand your own creative vision. Recently, I came across a great book about finding your photographic vision by David duChemin called Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I am about halfway through and it is a fantastic read so far and really helps one to understand their own defining photographic style.

-Alex

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