Develop a Distinctive Photographic Style & Stand Out from the Crowd

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] In today's world, photography has been largely democratized. Practically, everyone has a smartphone camera in their pocket, and the advent of social media has also made photographers spring out, right, left, and center. Now more than ever, photographers are struggling to set themselves apart. One of those ways you can successfully stand out from the crowd is by developing your own distinctive photographic style, which is pretty much your own creative voice. With a unique and easily identifiable photographic style, you are definitely on a path to finding true purpose, economic viability, and long-term satisfaction, with your creative practice. My name is KC Nwakalor, and I'm a Documentary Photographer and Producer and my work focuses on humanizing real socioeconomic, health, and environmental issues within the African continent and the African diaspora. In the last six years, I have worked in more than six African countries and my work has been largely published in numerous international publications, like The New York Times, Bloomberg, Financial Times, amongst others. I've also been commissioned by a lot of development organizations like UNICEF, USAID, World Food Program, etc. In this class, I would be teaching you techniques that I've used in my own practice. These techniques have helped me develop a distinctive photographic style and has been instrumental to my career successes within a short period of time. This class is great for everyone at all levels of their creative practice. In as much as the focus skill is photography, things taught in this class would be largely relatable and deployable in any creative work that you presently engage in. Do you want to stand out from the crowd? Do you want to find depth and true meaning in your practice, or you just want to make creative work that is more economically viable? Do you want to find your audience and your tribe to attract the right clients and practice your own photography on your own terms? Then this is the right class for you. We would unpack the various steps that I've taken to answer these pertinent questions. If you are ready as I am, jump right in, and let's get started. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] What is a class without an exciting class project? An incomplete class. I implore you to participate in the class project because it gives you the unique opportunity to practice what you've learned, and to share your work with other students, and most importantly, to get a personalized feedback from me. Remember, you only get better by doing. I strongly encourage you to participate in the class project. The class project is to upload one images that embodies your own distinctive photographic style. Please upload your images along with a brief description of what makes your images distinctive. Do well to also share your work in progress or any other mini assignments that you've completed as you work through this class. To get the best value for this class, you would need a camera. It could be a DSLR, a smartphone, a point and shoot camera. Anything you have access to that can take descent images, that's perfectly fine. You also need a photo editing software on your computer, on your smartphone, like the Adobe Lightroom, Bridge or Snapseed. With that being said, let's get started. Come on. 3. Understanding Your Craft: [MUSIC] In any creative practice you have to understand why you do what you do. This I can also say with regards to other professions, but it is particularly important with creative endeavors. To understand your craft is to have a deeper understanding of the images you make or wish to make. It is the bedrock of your creative practice. It is what keeps you grounded and focused on what is most important to you, even when it's not trendy or popular. Starting off, I dabbled into weddings and events photography something I did for a while and got bored. That was when the real journey began. I took time to understand my craft. To understand my craft, I started with asking myself some pertinent questions, some of which I want you to ask yourself today. The first question is, who are you? This is always a good place to start. What is your life about? What do you hope to achieve out of life? Who are you? We can be different things at different times with different people, but our core values often stay the same. For me, I had to mentally go back in time to investigate what my dreams and aspirations were. What made me feel happy and fulfilled? At the crux of this was my heart to help and support people, to see that I leave people better off than they were when they met me first. I was one person has stood up for the people I cared about. I helped amplify voices that I believed in. I've always believed in the truth. Practically everyone close to me knows that I do not tolerate lies. This has always been my core values. What other traits do you think a photojournalist or a documentary photographer needs to possess? Simply the urge to amplify vulnerable voices and the empathy to do it ethically and truthfully. The second question is, why photography? There are so many mediums of expression. You could be a filmmaker, you could be a painter. Why photography? I said I asked myself why not other tools. Why must it be with a camera? There is no right or wrong answer but you have to be truthful to yourself. For me, I like how powerful photographs are. It's as easy to access and digest. It is not limited by language as human experience across board is similar. Example, regardless of your race, your religion, your geographical location if you see a photo of a mother and a child, you can relate with that image. I also like how photography is not exhaustive. It shows you about enough to inform you, but gives you room for your own imagination and judgment. When a photo is well-taken, it forces you to think. The third question is, what is your end goal? I deal with real people, with real stories. The end goal for me is often to bring global attention to pressing issues so as to trigger relevant authorities to act or just to ganner some sort for people that need it. In a country like Nigeria, where governments support is almost non-existent with the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Northeastern Nigeria, which is as a result of Boko Haram or ISWAP terrorists operating in that region. This has led many families to get displaced from their communities, leaving their farmlands, and the source of livelihoods behind. Some are still trapped in the conflict zone. There is no hope for survival. Their only hope for survival might be through coordinated humanitarian assistance. Without compelling visual stories, how will NGOs raise money to continue to work in these hard-to-reach regions? Without photographs, get them published in new stories or newspapers like the New York Times or other popular news outlets. How will the public be compelled to pressure their governments to act? There are lots of crippling issues in my home country, Nigeria. Using my camera to tell the stories in a dignified way is one way I'm able to help the situation. Even if I don't fix the problem, at least I didn't fold my hands to watch. The fourth question is, where will your focus be? What will you be focusing on? The problems of the world is numerous. Too many things need our attention part-time. In this time and age, it is very easy to get distracted. Where will your focus be on? This is pretty much determatic area you decide to focus your practice on. This very choice is informed by who you are, your education, where you live, and what your end goal is. For me, I aim to humanize socioeconomic, health, and environmental issues within the African continent and the African diaspora. Socioeconomic issues because I was raised by a single parent in a working-class family in Nigeria. At the age of 14, I was already working to support myself through school. An average child in Northeastern Nigeria I'm privileged but to some great extent, I can relate to the harsh economic realities of Nigeria. Health and environmental issues because I have a background in biology. My background and interests have helped me to know where to focus on. I've done stories on sickle-cell disease, tuberculosis, blindness, family planning, global warming, pollution, and severe acute malnutrition. I've also done other stories relating to other health and environmental issues. If I do a story on sexuality or the topics that are not well acquainted with, viewers that understand the topic will feel the disconnect. It is important that you know who you are and focus on the things that you connect with on a deeper level. This in turn will help you tell nuanced visual stories. The last question would be, how will I make a living? Photographers have bills to pay. It is important to understand the economy of your creative practice. If not, you will quit out of frustration and hunger. I always tell people, if your goal is to be rich, you have to try some other type of businesses, not in photography. I'm yet to see a photograph on the Forbes list. Simply put, if money is your driving force or your primary aim as to why you want to be a photographer or any other creative practice for that matter, in no time, you would likely be frustrated. This is because creativity is fueled solely by passion. For me, I am based in Nigeria's capital city, which is Abuja. This is where all NGOs have their regional offices if they operate in Nigeria and the international airport is busing. International news agencies and NGOs are always looking for photographers to help gather visual communication materials. I am well-positioned to harness any story opportunities available in the whole of Nigeria. In this lesson, we've discussed some of the questions that I've asked myself to understand my craft even better. In asking and answering these questions truthfully, I found a deeper meaning and understanding of my craft. Some of the questions are, who are you? What is your work about? What are you trying to achieve? The next question would be, why photography? Why not other mediums? What is your end goal? Where will your focus be on tying into your education and interests and experience? How will you make a living? Are you well-positioned to get the opportunities? When you carefully and truthfully answer these questions, it will give you the insights you seek. Remember, there is no right or wrong answer as my journey and yours will always be different. For this lesson's assignment, I need you to write out your answers to the following questions. Who are you? Why do you do photography? What is your end goal? Where will you focus on? How will you make a living doing what you love? The answers to these questions will give you the needed clarity and depth to push your career to the next level. 4. Developing Your Photography Skills: [MUSIC] In as much as this class is not about the technical aspects of photography, I think it's important to touch on why you need to develop your photography skills. I mean, you can not have a photographic style if you don't know how to make good photographs in the first place. Making good photographs involves knowing how to use your camera, Understanding light, and making a good composition. In terms of understanding your camera, you need to understand your exposure. Exposure refers to the amount of light that reaches your camera sensor. It is controlled by the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO. Aperture is the size of the lens hall where light passes through to make your images. It's measured in f-stops, for example, F2.0, F4.5, F11, etc. The higher the F number, the smaller the aperture, which means the lens is letting in less light. The lower F number, there is more light coming in into the camera. The camera's aperture controls the depth of field, which is how much of your image is in focus. If it's mostly blurry, then it means that the picture has a shallow depth of field. In this time you're using a low F number. But if you use a high F number, which means that your lens is pretty much closed, then you have a sharper image. The shutter speed is how long your shutter stays open when you make an image. Is measured in fractions of seconds, which is pretty much five seconds, 1/60th of a second, 1/250th of a second. The longer the time, the more light enters the camera sensor, because the shutter is open. The lower the number, the less light it captures. The shutter speed also controls the motion blur, which is pretty much a blurriness that is caused when subjects move whilst the shutter is open. Then you talk about the light sensitivity, which is also the ISO, it is the camera's sensor's sensitivity to light. Is measured in ISO number which is 100, ISO 400, ISO 1,000, etc. The higher the number, the more sensitive the sensor is to light. The lower the number, the less sensitive to light. Light sensitivity controls the noise, which is pretty much like a grainy effect on your photos when you use high ISO. With these three functions, you can control the exposure of your images. You have to aim to get a well-exposed image unless over-exposure or under-exposure serves your creative needs. You have to read your camera's manual to know what button or knob that can control what function. In terms of light, light is everything in photography. Having an understanding of light will have a huge positive impact in your work. If an image is too bright, then you can say it's overexposed. If it's too dark, you say it's under-exposed. If it's neither too dark nor too bright, then it is well exposed. Unless creatively intentional, a photographer must aim to produce a well-exposed image. There are various types of lights that are grouped based on their intensity or how it's used. You have the hard and the soft light and you also have the key and the fill light. Hard light is pretty much a high-intensity light. Is often coming from a single source or a direction and it produces high contrast. Example is your direct sunlight at noon or flash faced on. You also have the soft lights, which is a diffused light, often coming from multiple directions. It produces low contrast. On a very cloudy day, on overcast sky, you get like a good soft light. Key lights is pretty much the main lights that lights up your subjects while the fill light fills up the shadow areas. I strongly recommend that you do not depend on postproduction to fix the exposure of your images. You have to always aim to get your exposures right from the camera. Another thing that can improve your photography immensely is the composition, which is pretty much the creative placement of components within the frame of your photo. The ultimate aim in your photo should be to place your main subject in such a way that it stands out. You can achieve this by composing your image in a way that the environment and other components help direct the eye of the viewers to the main subject of your photo. I have discussed extensively on the various compositional techniques that you can apply to make your photographs better in these classes. Do well to check them out. In this class, we've talked about the various aspects of photography, which is understanding your camera, the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO. We also talked about the various types of light. Then we closed it out with an understanding of your composition. For the assignments of this lesson, I want you to experiment with depth of field and motion blur by tweaking your camera's aperture and shutter speed. [MUSIC] 5. Developing Your Style: [MUSIC] Every photographer makes photographs but masters make unique photographs. Explaining photographic style can be a bit difficult because it is somewhat abstract. Think of photographic style as a photographer's creative voice. Successful artists have the style, different musicians sing a certain way. They have a certain melody and a definite tonality to their voice. As a photographer, you need to find your own creative voice, your own photographic style, and this can be developed through intentional consistency. Here are the elements that you can tweak to develop your own distinctive photographic style. The first is how you shoot. How you consistently make photographs whether intentionally or unintentionally, can ultimately determine your photographic style. Do you like wide or close-up images? Do you shoot mostly vertical or horizontal images? What angles are you often drawn to? For me, I started off getting really close to my subject for almost every shot. I use prime lenses so it forces me to get close to the action and suck up the energy and express that in my photos. Earlier on in my career, I was making a lot of close up portraits with my 15 millimeter lens. I liked to show the details in the skin and the stories in their eyes. But as I continue to grow and evolve in my career, I started to make more environmental portraits. The face or detailed in the skin wasn't enough to tell the story, so I learned to incorporate more of the environment using a 28-millimeter lens to give a sense of who I photographed. I learned that the environment holds too many details to be excluded from the composition of my sharp. Ultimately, how you shoot your images, what angle, what lens you use, what distance you shoot from when used over time, consistently can shape your own photographic style. The next would be how you compose your shots with the knowledge of the various compositional techniques. Over time, you will start noticing a trend in your photos composition-wise, you will start noticing a certain type of composition opportunity whenever you want to make photographs. Personally, I like to use shapes, balance, and lines in my composition. Sometimes I experiment with other compositional techniques like Larry. But the first three are predominantly what I use. To find out yours, take a look at your portfolio and see what compositional techniques you are often using. The third element would be how you use light. Light is a crucial aspect of photography. In fact, without light, there will be no photography, it would be pitch black, complete darkness. How you use lights in your photographs can contribute to your photographic style. In terms of source, there are basically two types of light, which is pretty much the natural ambient light or the artificial light. Natural ambient light is pretty much sunlight bulb in the room, while artificial light is strobes and flash. In my practice, I work with natural and ambient light. In most of my photos, I mean, documentary photography is often about telling stories of real people or events. So if I work with what is available at the location of the shoe, I retain that aspect of the realness of the story. So next would be how you edit your photos. Here I'm talking about post-production of your images. Editing is also used in the context of sequencing and arranging your work. For editing within this context, I'm referring to the adjustments you make to your photos like color grading, contrast, saturation, reduction of highlights and the lights. While this is not a class on how you can edit your work, you have to understand that how your photographs look can immensely contribute to your photographic style if it's consistent. How you edit your work is subjective, but the primary thing is that you stay true to yourself. My editing process is pretty much simple and straightforward. It has stayed consistent for years, and people that know my work can recognize it from a distance. I like to turn down my saturation, improve the clarity, adjust the highlights and shadows to match the specific photograph because I have to present the true nature of the things I photograph. I do not tweet colors in a way that it alters reality. I also like black and white photos. In fact, I post only black and white photos in my Instagram. Asides, my like for it, I use it as a source of protection against online theft. On my website, most of my images are in color, except for the ones or the project that I shot in black and white. To make sure you stay consistent in your editing, I strongly advise that you save your edits as a preset on light room or as an action on Photoshop, depending on what you use to edit your pictures. The next element would be how you present your work. How you present your work can also contribute to your photographic style. Some photographers utilize borders, some crop their images in square format, whatever it is, how you present your work also contributes to the whole package of your photographic style. This part refers to the extra work that you put in to make your work unique. This is all about presentation and packaging of your photos. It's also important to note that this could be time-consuming, but if it is what you like, it can improve the overall experience for your viewers. Personally, I do not have the extra time to put in the extra work to present my work. So if the composition permits, I post square images on my Instagram. I like how it looks, and it also adds another layer of protection from online theft of my work. The next element is the images you consume. There is a saying you are pretty much what you eat. If you're a photographer, there's a huge chance that other photographer's work may have inspired you to pick up the camera. Sometimes, often without knowing, we start making images that look like the ones we consume. To develop your own distinctive photographic style, it's important that you consume a different variety of images. When you have a lot of sample of work to be inspired by, you have a higher probability of producing something uniquely different from the individual's work that made up the sample. This is what I like to call creative copying, which is pretty much getting bits and bobs from here and there to create your own unique thing. Consume more work, buy more photography books, go to exhibitions, go to photographer's website, and keep experimenting until you find what's best represents your vision. Then last element is what you shoot, what you often point your camera at can also contribute to your photography style and profile. Even a music, we know musicians that often talk about relationships, some talk about money and romance, and some are into more inspiring and empowering topics. It's pretty much the same thing in photography, what you often point your camera adds becomes your thematic area. Throughout my career, most of my stories are usually based on health, environmental, socio-economic issues. I've listed some of the reasons why I'm drawn to this type of topics in my previous lesson. What you shoot becomes your beat, it becomes the message you put out in the world. It becomes what clients hire you for, it becomes what you are known for, it becomes an integral part of your creative voice and your photographic style. The big question is, what do you want to be known for? In this lesson, we've talked about the various elements of your photographic style, namely, how you shoot your images, how you compose your shot, how you use lights and your editing process, how you present your work, the images that you consume, and what you shoot often. Uniquely tweaking these various elements can help you develop your own distinctive photographic style. In this lesson's assignment, I want you to take the time to look at your photos, write out your observations regarding the various elements of your photographic style. [MUSIC] 6. Staying Consistent: It can't be a photographic style without consistent and consistency can only be attained through repetition over time. While this sounds simple and straight to the point, it isn't always as easy as it sounds. Consistency requires discipline. I'm going to list steps that can help you stay consistent so that you can build your own photographic style. Consistency is key because your clients want the assurance that you can consistently produce images that match what you presented in your portfolio. Nobody wants to gamble with their time, money, and other useful resources. Here are the steps that you can take. The very first part is to study your work. It entails you actively looking through your archive to see how your work has evolved over time. If you're starting off, you need to continually take photos to enable you have something to review later on. When you look at your work, you will start seeing a pattern. Ironically, not seeing a pattern is also a pattern. A pattern that means your work lacks intentionality that is required to be a credible voice within the creative space. What type of photos are you drawn to most? Maybe you need to dig deeper in those types of themes. What type of compositions do you see more often? Do you want to stick with that? The idea of studying your work is pretty much to understand and evaluate it. When you better understand your work, you can consistently produce that type of work. Studying your work helps you evaluate what you have done in the past so that you can make better decisions with what you will need to do now or in the future. The next step is to refine your creative workflow. Workflow is basically how your work flows from ideation, research, preparing a shoot, shooting, downloading the images to a laptop, editing, processing the images to exporting and backup. Different photographers have a different workflow. If you have to go through these steps, which I know every photographer goes through, you already have a workflow, but it is probably not defined. Refining and defining your workflow helps you stay consistent in the results you produce. My workflow is pretty much simple; I start out with ideation, which is pretty much me writing out my ideas in a notebook and sketching out visual ideas, pretty much writing things down. Then I had to research, which is basically me Google, searching a topic or finding an organization that is working on the theme, reading books or topics, or just speaking with someone that is knowledgeable about the topic. When I've started my research, then I prepare for a shoot because already have made contacts with the right people to photograph, then for the shoots and I make sure I have the right lens, the camera body, my camera memory cards are formatted, my batteries are charged, my recorder is packed. On the day of the shoot, I try to get a variety of shots of my subjects in different scenarios and environment. This is also the time for me to bring my visual ideas into reality. Then in editing and processing of my images, I download the images onto a laptop, process them first on a bridge to sort the images and star them, then move into Lightroom to apply my presets and also impute metadata information. I then proceed to export the photos in the right format. Then I close off by backing up my files on a hard drive and on a Cloud storage. The more structured your workflow is, the more consistent your outputs would be. Consider automating some of the processes. It will save you valuable time and energy. For editing, if you use Lightroom or Photoshop, there is a function to save your edits adjustments as presets or actions. With just the click of a button, you are able to apply all editing adjustments you would normally make on a new photo. You could have variations of the same adjustment, maybe one for outdoor lights, another for indoor lighting. Then the very last step in this process would be to share your work. To stay consistent, you have to consistently and continuously share your work. I advise you to experiment in private, but always make sure that you put out work that represents your brand and what you stand for. You can't have an identifiable photographic style unless people can view and identify your work. In this lesson, we've talked about the need to study your work by also understanding the type of photos you're drawn to most, the need to refine your workflow and a very important need to share your work. All these things come together to help you become consistent at your work. For this lesson's assignment, I want you to write out your present workflow and also write out the ways you intend to refine it. 7. Finding Your Niche: [MUSIC] The final parts of crystallizing your photographic style or creative voice is by carving a niche for yourself. You know, niche here refers to the specialized segment of the market for a particular product or service. Within the photography industry, there are different specialized segments. Example, product photography, photojournalism, travel photography, wedding, and events photography. The list is endless. The first step in carving a niche is by understanding and choosing what type of photography you want to do. If you're starting out, I strongly recommend that you try the various types of photography to know which one you enjoy the most. Particularly for this lesson, I'm talking about carving a niche, within a choosen niche. This right here can help you stand out even more and help form a huge part of your photographic style. Occupy a niche does not mean you have to reject jobs that fall outside your niche. It just means you consistently push out content that further promotes your desired niche. Niche is pretty much you utilizing your unique attributes to set yourself apart from the crowd. Here are the steps you can take to carve your own niche using a model I call the niche model. First would be understanding your goals. As you might have already answered in the first lesson of this class, I would ask again, what are your goals? What do you plan to achieve with your photography? Knowing your goals in clear terms will help you find your own niche. As I earlier shared, being born in a country with countless issues, I became very frustrated and I decided to speak up on these issues using my camera. I just didn't focus on every issue Nigeria is plagued with. I narrowed it down to aspects that I was connected to. Which was pretty much health and environmental issues due to my academic background in biology, socioeconomic issues, because of my social and economic struggles growing up in a single-parent working class family in Nigeria. Understanding my goals have helped me carve a niche for myself and subsequently helped me stand out from the crowd of photographers that are presently working in Nigeria. The second part is your economic realities. We love photography as a know but if we were to make a living doing what we love the most, we must consider the economic realities at play. You have to consider the prospects of getting hired, commissioned, or getting paid to produce work. Social media has breached some of these economic gaps. Artists can independently sell their work online or through NFTs. However, as photographers, we have to find where our clients are, what they need, and how we can serve that need. As I earlier mentioned, I am based in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria. With the insecurity and other issues still ongoing in Nigeria, there's a huge international development operation within the country. I am well-positioned to take on opportunities as they arise. You have to find ways that your goals ties into your economic realities. If you do product photography, you want to be based where there are lots of small businesses. If you're into wedding and event, you want to be where these things happen. The third thing is your personality and your skills. You have to be true to yourself at the end of the day by playing to your own strengths. If you're not patient or not a people person, maybe wedding photography is not for you. If you don't like traveling or walking in volatile areas, maybe photojournalism is not for you. We all have different personality traits and dispositions, and it is our duty to find how we can use these things to our advantage. The skills you presently have or the skills that you're willing to develop can be harnessed to carve your own niche. Different types of photography requires different types of skills. For example, you can't choose to become a wildlife or sports photographer and all you use, always comfortable using, is a prime lens. You will definitely need experience handling zoom lenses if you are to become successful in that field. Whilst you might not be able to change your personality, you can acquire new skills. That tiny intersection point between your goals, the economic realities, and your personality and skill is where your niche lies. In this lesson, we've discussed how to find your own niche, as this is always a crucial parts of cementing your own photographic style, visual voice, or identity, whatever you like to call it. We talked about understanding your goals, doing a reality check on your economic realities, and understanding your personality and skills, and how the intersection point of these three unique attributes can define your niche. The assignment for this lesson is for you to use the niche model provided in this class to identify your own niche. [MUSIC] 8. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Congratulations is in order. You made it to the end of the class. That is enough reason to celebrate you because not everyone that starts eventually finishes, so I'm super proud of you. Let us run through some of the things that we've learned in this class. We discussed the various building blocks that would help you create your own distinctive photographic style to enable you stand out from the crowd. We talked about the need to understand your craft, which is basically the why of your creative practice. If you're not well-grounded in your craft, you will be easily swayed by what is trendy or popular. We also talked about developing your photographic skills. I shared tips and resources on how you can become a better photographer in today's world. Then we talked about developing your own style, which is you shooting, editing, presenting your work your own way. Then we talked about ways you can stay consistent, which is pretty much building a creative workflow that keeps your results consistent every single time. Then we concluded with finding your niche using my niche model, you can find your own niche and stick to it. Remember that your photographic style will continue to evolve as you grow as a photographer so always give yourself room to grow. Of what use is all my talk if we don't want to put what you've learned into practice. That is the essence of the class project. It is an opportunity to share your work with the community, and receive personalized feedback from me. The class project is to upload 1-3 images that embodies your photographic style. Do well to include a descriptive text of what makes your image as distinctive. I would also like to see your work in progress or any of the many assignments that you've completed as you walk through this class. It's been an amazing journey with you, and if you enjoyed this class, do well to drop a review. If you'd like to connect or be in the loop with my upcoming classes and projects, do also follow me on Skillshare or on my website at kcnwakalor. Until we meet again, [NOISE] peace out.