Your subject and personal style in photography

I am an amateur photographer who is completely self taught. Admittedly, that is not saying much; I believe the quality of my photographs fall in the "okayish to decent" category, so I've achieved probably as much as a million other self taught amateur photographers. But, I really want to change that; I would want to decrease that number of people who can be compared to me to 10,000 maybe, self taught or not (one can dream, right?). After about 4-5 years of doing photography, my interested gravitated towards "controlled" studio photography and bought some studio equipment last year, to practice. (I've since realized that even in studio photography, "complete control" is an illusion. There is always luck involved).

One of the things that I've been reading quite often lately is the importance of personal style. Most recently, this article at Luminous Landscape discusses why personal style is important. Personal style is what differentiates you from any other photographer. If you and any other photographer is put under exactly the same conditions, both of you would probably come back with very different pictures. That is personal style.

Now, how do you go about finding your personal style? Probably the first thing you do is get inspired from others' work. That is really helpful in general to improve photography, but I found that to be of little help in trying to find personal style. I've probably found more success just thinking in my mind what I want to photograph next, and trying to set it up. One example of it is in the following picture: It is an attempt to have an early morning feeling with window light, but is actually taken in a studio at 10.30 pm in the night! There is no window in that direction.

Early morning looks from Aditi (click on image for larger version).

I tried to analyze why this photo works as intended: Firstly, there is of course the soft light which looks like there is a window just outside the frame. But the real reason is the combination of clothes, unmade hair and the ruffled instead of stretched curtains in the back. Her expression that looks like she is interested in what is outside adds to the overall idea (this is the luck part - only one in about 30 photos had this expression). Editing this photo was really simple: I took the RAW out of the camera and simply selected one of B&W presets in Lightroom.

This analysis also made me realize one thing: your subject and the environment makes or breaks the photo. Great sensor, great lens, and even great lighting will fail you if your subject is boring. And if you think about all the great photographs in history, you'll realize they are loved mainly because of their subject (look at these for e.g.: Afghan girl, Pepper #30, Girl holding kitten, Man jumping over puddle). It has motivated me to put more and more effort into setting up what is in front of my camera. Frankly speaking, though this realization looks very obvious, it is very easy to get lost in the whole technique (lighting is technique too) and editing it differently routine. The current fad of "Art" Filters like cross processing or miniaturization is one example.

Coming back the question of personal style, I think I've at least found a direction. I am going to take studio photos of people (or, rather, photos in controlled lighting), but I want people never to describe it as studio photo of someone. No more headshots on a white background. No more beauty shots. Instead, setup ever more unexpected scenes in front of the camera. Where the picture makes sense, but something one would not expect to see based on a verbal description, say. One great example I found recently for the above idea is the following photo of Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas by Martin Schoeller:

A great example of an unexpected visual setup but still displaying the dexterity of the gymnast. Click on the image to see more images of Olympic athletes from the same photographer.