Developing a photographic style

- Couple of months ago I was motorcycling across Nevada, and as I sometimes do when I'm riding in really remote places, I was listening to a podcast as I was riding. I was listening to an episode of NPR's Fresh Air, and Terry Gross was interviewing Jon Stewart. I think The Daily Show had just ended and she was playing back interviews that she'd done. He was telling the story of one of his earliest gigs in New York when he had a 2 AM time slot every single night at some comedy club. He was saying how, you know, of course, there's hardly any audience at 2 AM.

But that what that experience did for him, doing that time slot over and over, going there in the middle of the night and just doing his act, whether there was an audience there or not. Doing that over and over, what that did for him he said was he learned to stop impersonating a comedian and become a comedian. So I was listening to that as I was riding along. I was thinking, well that's very interesting, and then I listened to something else, and then it started raining or what not. Then a little bit later I was outside of, I think, Ely, Nevada.

A storm was coming and I was kind of racing the clock. I looked to my left and I saw a scene. I rode on past it as I do sometimes going ooh should I have shot that? Do I have time, there's rain coming, I don't know. I'm really gonna regret it later, okay I'll turn around. Then I went back and I took the picture and it was this. Then I edited it into this. The original obviously needed some brightening. I didn't do that by the side of the road. Obviously, I did the editing later. So I took the picture and then I drove on.

I had an errand to do in town and then I kept riding. But I just felt weird. I kept thinking about this picture. I was trying to figure out what felt weird about it. I realized after a bit that when I saw it, and the light was actually different when I first saw it. So there's these campers in front of the trees, the trees were more backlit, there was a little more light in the sky. For some reason when I saw it, I thought I did not look at this scene and see it through my own eyes, I recognized it as a photo. I'm not sure if those are the right words for what I'm trying to describe.

But I don't feel, the reason I was feeling weird is I don't think I was actually seeing that for myself. I saw that and thought, oh I know that kind of picture. That's the kind of picture that's a picture of a certain type of Americana, the campers and RVs in a campsite outside of a small town. Oh I can imagine that accompanied by a such and such kind of story in a such and such kind of magazine. Oh I'll go take that picture. At that point I was not shooting an image that I was actually seeing. I was shooting an image that I recognized as a particular thing. I was mimicking.

I was not being a photographer, I was impersonating a photographer. There's a lot of merit to doing that. It's a great way to learn. It's actually not a bad idea to pick out a photographer and go try and shoot like them. Because when you do that, you start to understand the problems that they were facing, and by puzzling them out yourself, you get a better idea of what they figured out, and therefore, you've learned something that they know. But that's still not you shooting your vision or your eye, and maybe you don't have a vision yet. Maybe you don't have an eye yet.

Maybe you don't yet have a style that is your own. Style is a weird thing. It's an ephemeral thing, it's hard to define. I don't know if I have one. I don't because I see the world that I, the way that I see the world. I assume that everyone else sees the world that way. It can take a long time, it can take a lot of mimicry. It can take a lot of absorbing other people's things and playing with them and mixing and matching until you come up with your own. It's important to be aware though of when you are seeing something for yourself and when you're seeing something that you recognize as something.

Those are two very different ways of shooting. Again, they both have merit. If you find that you are constantly mimicking someone else, that's fine, just keep going, keep doing that. You may do that for years and then eventually one day something happens, and you're seeing something the way that you see it. But that's built on top of technical and aesthetic skills that you've learned from other people. This is how we progress in this discipline. It's how we progress as a society by building on what came before. So I don't know really know what else I have to say besides that. It's just something I noticed as a I driving around in the middle of nowhere in Nevada.