Find Your Photography Style: Create a Unique & Consistent Look

1. Class Introduction: Okay, I want you to imagine something. Imagine if you could shoot absolutely anything that you wanted, whether it be cars, landscapes, street photography, still life, travel photography, whatever it is, and still have all of those photos match into a cohesive visual look. Believe it or not, this is entirely possible, and it all comes down to style. Your style is your identity as a photographer. It's the thing that ties all of your images together to tell one cohesive story, and it's what makes you stand out as a photographer. It's also one of the more difficult photography concepts to grasp. That is until you've watched the scores. Hey, guys, my name is Sean Dalton. I'm a travel photographer and YouTube were based in Bali Indonesia. And over the last ten years, I've dedicated a lot of my energy to really honing in my style and getting to the point where I can shoot absolutely whatever I want and still have it fit into my unique photography style. Honestly, it's been a lot of trial and error, but I've taken everything that I've known about finding your photography style, and I've put it together here in this course for you today. And we're going to be covering everything that you need to know to find your own unique photography style. We're going to start off with a few core concepts about style that will really lay the groundwork for you to build your style upon. After that, we're going to move on to my four part framework for finding your own unique photography style. And this is something that I've developed over the last ten years, learning how style is created and what actually constitutes style in photography. I'm also going to drop a bunch of tips throughout this course so make sure you stay tuned from start to top. So if you're a photographer and you feel like your work is just a little bit all over the place in your lacking style, this course was designed to help you hone that in and create your own signature style that you've got. We have a lot to get into, guys. I'm super stoked that you're here, so let's jump into the first lesson now. 2. What is style in photography?: I want to start this course off with talking about what style actually is. Like, what is style in the context of photography? Because if we can't truly understand style and the components of style, then how are we going to create our own style? There's many ways that you can define style, but this is how I define it in the context of photography. Style is the consistent use of a visual or a thematic element in your photos. Could be a number of things. This could be a consistent use of a specific type of subject matter. So maybe you're shooting cars and all of your photos are of cars. That could be one sort of a style, but it can also be things like lighting. Maybe you like to shoot in very dramatic lighting and you consistently shoot in this type of light. Well, that can be a visual element that gns true across your entire body of work, making it your style as well. Also be consistently using a very specific color palette in your work. Maybe you're really drawn to more pastel colors or maybe you like to shoot in black and white. That can be a defining feature of your style. But it can also be in the form of more technical settings as well. For example, if you're shooting all of your photos at 50 millimeter, that will create a visual consistency across your entire body of work, and that can be part of your style more times than not, it's not just one of these things that defines your style. It's a combination of all of them. It's the way you use color, light, subject matter and how all of these factors come together to tell the story of that photograph. And ultimately, if you boil down style enough, it all comes down to this core idea of story and the consistent story that you're telling across your entire body of work. Throughout the rest of this course, I'm going to be talking about these visual elements quite a bit, but I'm also going to always be tying them back into story. And when we take a look at some of these other photographers who have a very defined style, I will break down some of the common consistent visual elements that they use in their photos, but I'm also going to talk a lot about the story that those photographers are telling with their image, which ultimately is the most important feature of their style. Now, I think it's also important to note that not everything has to be consistent. You don't always have to use the same composition. You don't always have to use the same subject matter, lighting, or colors in your long as your photos are telling that consistent story across your entire body of work, then that's your style. And when I look at my style, for example, where I can shoot any type of subject matter but still have it fit into that style, well, that's because I'm staying consistent with my compositions. I'm staying consistent with the use of lighting in my images and color in my images. And the story of those images are all similar as well, and that allows me to shoot anything that I want and still maintain that consistent style. So while you don't have to stay consistent with all of the visual elements across your entire body of work, the more that you do consistently use, the easier it will be to tell that consistent story in those photos. I hope that makes sense. That's my general definition of style. I think this is a really important way to look at it. Yes, it's all of the visual elements in your photograph, things like lighting, composition, subject matter, color, but it's also the story that those photos are telling, as well. Now, to get your brain going a little bit, I want to do a little exercise. I want you to find three of your favorite photos that you've ever taken in your entire. I want you to put those in front of you, and I want you to ask yourself three questions about those photos. Number one, what visual choices stand out to you across all of these images? Is it the lighting? Is it the color? Is it the subject matter? When you look at those images, what's the first thing that speaks to you in those photos? Next, I want you to ask yourself, what emotions do those photos convey? Do those photos make you feel sad? Do they make you feel happy? Maybe one makes you feel happy. The other one makes you feel sad. Do they feel sophisticated? Do they feel basic, whatever comes to your write those things down as well. And lastly, are there any patterns between these images? Are there any visual elements that you've used consistently across all of these photos? Were you shooting in similar light? You know, are the colors similar or the composition similar? Make note of this as well. Looking at our photos deeper like this is integral in us finding our style. And I think it's important not just in the beginning before we set out on this quest to find our unique photography style, but also continuously throughout this process, every time you go out and shoot, it's taking a few of those images, looking for consistencies between them, and asking yourself how those images make you feel and the things that really stand out in those images. If you can continuously do this over time, your style is going to naturally emerge. But I want to spend a little bit more time on this idea of reading an image. So in the next lesson, I want to break down some photographers with very established styles. I want to walk you guys through the things that I'm seeing in those images and also the story that those images are telling as well. So let's move on to that lesson. 3. Learning to Read an Image: Ki alluded to in the last video, learning how to read an image is incredibly important for us in finding our own unique style. And in this lesson, I want to take a look at some photographers who have a very defined style, break down some of the visual elements that ring true across their entire body of work, and also talk about the story that their images are telling as well. And this lesson is not only important for learning how to look at an image deeper and learning how to read that image, but it's also incredibly important for us to determine what we actually like in a photo when we're finding our style, one of the most important things for us to know is what actually looks good to us. What are the things that we like to see in a photograph? So I love this exercise, and I highly recommend you guys try this out as well. But with that set, the first photographer I want to look at is this photographer named Billy Dee, and Billy is an incredible photographer. He's one of my favorites, and he shoots these really poetic, kind of dark and moody and timeless images, a lot in New York City, street photography in New York City, but he also goes around the world, and he shoots. He's shot in India. He's shot all over, and his photos just all tell this really consistent story of life in the big city, you know, and life moving past you and kind of all of these little moments that you see on an everyday basis that, you know, most people might overlook, but he sees the beauty in it, and he sees that it's an important moment in time that people can look back on in ten, 20, 30 years and say, what an interesting time to be alive. And that's the first thing that I see when I see Billy Dee's images. But if you take a closer look at these photos, they're quite moody. He uses a lot of really dark colors like in this images here, there's all these silhouettes of these figures of walking throughout the frame, and it creates a sense of mystery in this photo. I find that with a lot of his images, they can be quite mysterious. Here's another good example of that. But they're also just documenting everyday life. If I go back to this image here with this couple, it's just a romantic moment. There's so much story in photos like this and Billy really is just a master of story in his work. Um, I really love the use of kind of muted colors that kind of bring the energy down a little bit in the photos. So the colors aren't distracting you from these scenes. He's letting the scenes speak for themselves, and he's really emphasizing light and composition to really get those stories across. His compositions are quite complex. That's one of the first things I noticed. He uses a lot of different elements. For example, in this photo, we have both of these people here perfectly framing the sky in the back doing something absolutely insane. This photo really epitomizes New York for me because I always see people like that in New York. Um, I love that one. Also, here's a good example of composition where he's using depth. He has someone in the foreground with a cigarette that creates a lot of interest in the foreground. He has somebody in the midground playing an instrument. Then, of course, you can see the Empire State Building in the back. Just naturally guiding your eyes back. There's interest at every level of the composition. So he uses these really kind of complex compositions to tell more meaningful stories. And you'll also notice he shoots a lot with wide angle lenses to allow him to do that. If he shot this at 50 millimeter, he wouldn't be able to fit all of these people in the frame here. So he does like shooting with kind of wider focal lengths. Here's another good example. There's just so much going on in the composition. And he also uses a lot of juxtaposition. So he uses things like mirrors to kind of show reflections and other parts of the image like we see here, also here with the eye and the man in the car, both are kind of making eye contact, just kind of tying everything together. And also, here's another good example of composition where everyone's kind of laid out in the frame. It just kind of makes you think, What are these people doing? You know, what's going on in their lives? But I really do like to look at Billy's work kind of as a whole, because while each image does tell this really powerful story, when you kind of zoom out and you look at all the images together, you instantly see this theme of, you know, people living their everyday life in New York City, and I really love his use of kind of darker exposures, muted colors, you know, very high contrast, and also just very busy compositions that all kind of work together to tell the story that he's telling in these photos. So if you guys haven't checked out Billy, I highly recommend doing his work is absolutely stunning, especially his work from New York City in Winter. That's my all time favorite. These images here, just such a mysterious, timeless, epic vibe in these photos and quite abstract, as well. So Billy Dee is definitely one of my favorites. The next photographer I want to look at is actually a good friend of mine, and that is Finn Matson. He's a German photographer based here in Bali and his style couldn't be more different from Billy's style and also the style of some of the other photographers we're going to take a look at here pretty soon. But the way I would define Finn's style is grunge. It's got a ton of texture. There's a ton of depth to these images. He really pushes hard on certain colors and pulls other colors out, so a lot of his images have a very monochromatic color scheme to them, and they all have this really kind of classic grungy vintage vibe to them looks so, so cool. Finn is a massive inspiration to me, such a creative guy. And, you know, like I said, looking at these images, they almost feel alternative in a way. You know, because he's pushing the creative agenda so hard and so far, he's really taking things to the next level, and he's sacrificing certain elements in his photos to really just emphasize the story that these images are telling. So he might be sacrificing image quality, for example, because he's adding so much grain and texture to these photos, but it's okay because they all kind of tell this cohesive story. So let's take a look at a few of these images here. These portraits here he shoots a lot of portraits, and he likes to add, like I said, a lot of texture to them. I feel like that's a really defining feature of his style is the texture that he adds to them. Also the very film like colors, he does shoot a lot of film, but he also shoots a lot of digital as well. So you'll see they just look classic and timeless and he just lets certain colors really speak for themselves. These are some other good examples here. Also, the subject matter you see here, it's just very alternative. Like, there's a couch on the beach and a dude just chilling in the couch. It's super cool and creative. And I feel like that's a big part of Finn's style there. I'd also say his compositions are extremely dynamic. So it's never just, you know, this is what you see in front of you. It's How can I play with composition to add a sense of urgency or a sense of energy to the photos. For example, here, he did the shoot in LA with a porch and this guy on the back of a skateboard using slower shutter speeds to really kind of emphasize the dynamic energy. And he's also kind of tilting the camera a little bit to add a bit of chaos into the photos. And, you know, looking back at his images, I'd say there is a lot of kind of chaos in these images. This one here, once again, he's kind of using motion blur to express this mood of kind of just a vibe kind of abstract day on the beach, smoking a cigarette and also heavy use of color as well. And if you get back into some of his other photos here, just the mood is just so strong in all of these photos. I think if I had to boil it all down into one thing, I would say Finn is a master of mood. He's a master of expressing this kind of solemn, almost lonely, reflective vibe in his images that he does across this entire body of and I personally just find it so incredibly beautiful and thoughtful. So Finn is definitely one of my favorite photographers. I highly recommend you guys check him out. His use of lighting, his use of colors, use of texture, composition, and subject matter all fit together to tell this really cohesive story in his images, and I'm a big fan of Finn Matson. Now, the next photographer I want to look at is also a photography YouTuber, and I am personally in love with his work. He's a good friend of mine. This is James Popsis, and his style could not be more different than the last two photographers that we looked at. The first thing I notice about James photos is they're very clean. Really likes to keep his compositions nice and clean and also very balanced, as well. So as you can see, everything just feels perfectly weighted. If there's something on the right side of the frame, there's something on the left side of the frame that balances it out. As you can see here in this photo, that's a good example of that. In this photo, as well, we have all these different lines kind of converging on the main subject, which is the lighthouse, but there's secondary subjects as well that kind of balance out the composition as well. So just a master of composition, and also, a lot of his compositions are quite simple, as well. So he really wants the composition to show you exactly what you want to look at in those images. Here's a good example of that. We have a post on the right, we have a person on the left. There's really nothing else to look at. He also uses exposure to blow out certain parts of his image, like we see here in the sky. So those parts of the image aren't distracting us from the most important thing, which are the subject, the pole and the person in this photograph here. Same thing we have here. We have a really balanced composition with the subjects in the middle of the frame. We have a midground in the houses, and we have a background in the back, as well. But you know exactly what you're supposed to look at when you look at James Espado. And if you compare this to someone like Billy Dee, where there's so much going on in the composition, this is so much simpler and easier to look at. It doesn't mean one is better than the other. These are just two very different styles of photography here. One of the things I also notice about James' images is he uses kind of these really bright, soft pastel colors. He doesn't crush his blacks. His blacks are quite soft. His shadows are quite soft, and he really likes almost a brighter image. And he also uses very balanced colors as well that almost look more realistic than you'd see in a lot of other photographers knows when to emphasize certain colors, and he also knows when to tone down certain colors to let the composition or the subject really speak for itself in those photos. And all of these themes ring true across James's entire body of work. I can click on any of these images, and you will see all of these things that I'm talking about here balanced composition, solid use of color. Kind of a brighter arier look to the images. And he also shoots everything in landscape orientation, as well. I don't know if you could see that, but all of his images are shot in landscape because for him, that's the best way that he feels he can describe a specific place is by shooting it in landscape and keeping those compositions really nice and consistent. James really is one of my favorite photographers, and he's really a master of what he does. But kind of going back to this idea of story, though, I realize I didn't really talk about the story that he's telling these images. James does an amazing job of kind of talking about the relationship between man made objects and nature. Almost all of James' images are shot outside, and they almost all have some sort of a man made element to them, as well. So it's kind of this intersection between nature and man made objects that really define James's style. And when you bridge that the subject matter, and also you bridge his more stylistic elements, like the use of exposure, color, composition, those all really come together to tell a very cohesive style in James' photos. And out of all the photographers that I've looked at today, I think James has the most consistent style, and he's been shooting like this for years, and James is the type of photographer where if I see one of his images, I immediately know that James took that photo because that's how consistent he is with stylistic elements and with subject matter and story in all of his images. Last photographer I want to look at is actually me. I want to show you guys my photos. I want to break down some of the themes that are common throughout my photography and talk to you guys about my intentions with my photography, because ultimately your intentions with your photography really do dictate your style. We're going to talk about that a little bit later on in this course, as well. But my style really has changed so much throughout the years. And one of the things that you'll find on this journey of finding your photography style is it's going to change. Your preferences are going to change. You might be into something one year, and then the next year, you might be into something completely different. But if you're true to yourself and you're chasing what you want, your style will naturally kind of evolve it will all still kind of fit together because there'll be a natural gradient between the shifts in your style. So for me, for the longest time, I was really drawn to these really dark and moody and almost lonely looking images with really dramatic light and really bold colors as well. So a good example of this are these photos here that I shot that all kind of emphasize this really dramatic light that I found throughout the world. I am just naturally really drawn to very dramatic light, and all of these images utilize super strong light and very bold and vivid colors as well. I really do like to chase a more monochromatic color scheme, so letting one color really speak for itself and dominate that image to maximize the emotion associated with that specific color. These are all really good examples of that. And this is photography that I still choose to pursue. But with that said, I'm also really drawn to these kind of more vibe, timeless, almost film like scenes in major cities. So, for example, I was just shooting in San Francisco, and I'm really inspired by a lot of these film photographers that shoot in San Francisco and other major cities around the US. So that was a big part of my intention during that trip was to capture photos that are kind of similar to that vibe. And these are photos that I shot. And while they are extremely different from the photos that I just showed you with the really strong dramatic light in the landscapes, kind of epic landscapes with one single person in the middle, they still kind of have a similar vibe because I'm still really drawn to these kind of darker exposures, these bold colors and really emphasizing complimentary colors. So warm and cool tones within one image. This is a good example. We have a lot of warmth in the shadows here. We have a lot of deep blues in the sky. This is another good example of that. And once again, another good example of that, as well, and also still into the dark and moody vibe. And later on that day when I was shooting, it got really dark and moody, and I was frothing because this is what I love to shoot. So even though I'm shooting something completely different, and my inspiration is something completely different as well, because I'm being inspired by film photographers, it still kind of has the same vibe. Throughout that style. So I'm really drawn to bold, vivid colors. I'm really drawn to very balanced compositions. I like when everything is nice and balanced and I use different compositional elements to achieve that. For example, here, I used the light in the scene to kind of balance out the scene a little bit. Here's another good example. I felt that the energy was kind of leaving the frame too much up on the top right hand corner here with these leading lines. So I used a foreground element to kind of pull the energy back down to the bottom of that frame. Balance out that composition a little bit, so it wasn't so unweighted, if that makes sense. Once again, bold colors in these images as well, something I'm always pursuing and also just very interesting use of light. I'm always looking for dramatic light in my images, and these images definitely tell that story. Same goes for a lot of these photos here. These are some photos that are shot in Moro Bay. And once again, just really utilizing light and color in these images here. Almost in pursuit of kind of telling this reflective story of my time in California, and that's ultimately what I want to do I want to tell a story about a place in the way that I specifically remember it. And these photos are a good example of how I personally remember Moro Bay. That is kind of my take on my style. And honestly, I'd be really curious to hear what you guys think of my style. Maybe you interpret it in a completely different way. This is how I interpret it. This is how I see the world. And, you know, I've gotten to the point now where when I'm out shooting, I'm not thinking about these things. These aren't things that are at the forefront of my mind. They've just become so ingrained into who I am as a photographer and as an artist, that it's just automatic. It's subconscious. So I shoot compositions that look good to me, and because I trust myself creatively, they all kind of fit this really cohesive style. And I think that's the ultimate point that we want to get to as photographers, right? Going to be very cerebral about finding your style at first, especially in a course like this where we're really actively trying to track it down. But over time, you're going to start to subconsciously prefer certain things in your photos, and you're just going to naturally shoot those photos, and you won't have to try for your style. It's just going to be there. So I hope this lesson was helpful for you guys. I wanted to do just kind of a raw breakdown of photos because I think a big part of reading photos is very kind of instinctive. You know, you could sit and break things down objectively, but I think it's also really important to take a look at it subjectively and in the moment and just talk about the way those photos are making you feel and the things that jump out to you like we did in that style lesson. This process of reading an image really is an integral part in us finding our own unique style. But with that said, I want to jump into more concrete lessons on finding your own unique style. And I've built a framework that I think you guys can really benefit from in finding your unique style. So let's talk about that framework. 4. The 4 Step Process to Finding Your Photography Style: So now that we've covered some more foundational lessons on style, we talked about what style is. And we also talked about how to read a style when we're looking at another photographer. Now it's time to jump into the four framework for finding your own unique photography style. And I like to call this the four Ps, purpose, preferences, process, and progression. And I'm going to explain to you guys what all of these things mean. First up is purpose. And I think before we do anything, we need to first define what our purpose is with photography because this will really help you understand what you actually want to shoot and what you actually want to pursue with your photography. Really answers the question as to why you take photos to begin with. And this really is the most foundational piece of you finding your own unique photography style. Next up is preferences. So what are you actually drawn to in a photograph? Do you like specific types of light? Do you like to use a certain type of composition? Do you like certain colors in your images? What are your actual preferences when it comes to looking at images? And a lot of this comes with consuming an image and really paying attention and reading those images to identify the things about those images that you actually like instead of just looking at it at face value and saying, Oh, I like this photo. Diving a little bit deeper and saying, Okay, why do you like this photo? What are the specific things that you like about it? And that's why that last lesson on learning how to read an image is so crucial to this process. Next up is the process, so how you actually create those photos. It's the technical and the creative methods that you use to create those images. And this very much is a learning phase because while you might know what you like in a you might not know how to actually get that look in your photo. So we're going to be talking a lot about that when we get to the process section of this course, as well. It's very much a learning experience, and I'm going to show you guys how to learn to capture the specific visual elements that you want to see in your photos. And lastly, is progression. So how your style evolves over time. Taking a deeper look at your work and recognizing patterns within that work and then refining your body of work over time to create that specific style. And like I said before, this is really a never ending phase because your style is always going to evolve as a photographer. There's not a start and an endpoint. It's an ongoing process. So we're going to talk a lot about that in the progression section of discourse, as well. So that is the four part framework that we're going to be focusing on for the rest of this course. So let's jump into that first lesson now where I'm going to ask you guys some pretty tough questions about your purpose in photography. 5. Step One: Defining Your Purpose with Photography: Like I said before, the first step in you finding your style is identifying your actual purpose with photography in the first place because your style is ultimately a reflection of you and your inner beliefs and the way that you see the world. And I absolutely love this quote by Hans Hoffman, who was an abstract expressionist painter in the 19th and 20th century. I think he really sums this idea up perfectly with this quote. He goes on to say, A work of art is a world in and of itself, reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. So, in other words, art is not just a picture or a photo or something that looks beautiful. Rather, it's almost a self contained universe that carries with it that artist's life experiences and just how they actually view the world. Every photo that you take carries your own unique perspective on life, whether you're aware of it or not. And if you can consciously tap into that and translate that into your work, your style will naturally become unique because you are unique. No one else in the world is exactly like your world view is unique. And I know this might sound fluffy and maybe a little bit too philosophical, but I promise you that it's true, because if you take a look at my work, for example, especially earlier on in 2020, 2021, I was really struggling with depression during that period. I was stuck here in Bali. There was no one here, and I just felt lonely and isolated, and I feel like those themes were really translated into my work. Even though I was completely unconscious to it, these themes definitely rag true into my photos. And now, as I've grown so much as an artist and as a person and I can consciously tap into the way that I'm feeling and the way that I view the world, I can translate that much better into my own work. So with that concept in mind, I want you to take a second to ask yourself these few questions here, and I want you to write out as much of a detailed response as you can to these questions. First one is what emotions do you want people to feel when they look at your photos? And this really does kind of tell us the overall story and the overall vibe that we want to tell with our images. This is the foundation of story in photography. Do you want to capture images that make people feel happy or joy? Do you want to capture images that make people feel a little bit melancholy? You want to capture something that's epic and you want to embody this idea of wonder and exploration. What are the emotions that you want people to feel when they look at your photos? You're having a hard time with this and you're not really sure, I think another way to ask this question is, what feelings do you resonate with most when it comes to movies, film, or music? Because if you ask yourself this question, that will kind of identify the feelings that you want to express or the stories that you want to express in your own photos. The second question that you should ask yourself is what subjects pull you in without any effort? So if you had a camera right now and you can shoot absolutely anything in the world, what would you point that camera at? What do you want to shoot? What are you most inspired by with photography, and it could be anything. It could be landscapes. It could be street photography, maybe you really want to shoot portraits, maybe you want to pursue more documentary photography. Write this down because this gives us a ton of clarity as to what we actually want to shoot. I know you don't necessarily need to shoot the same type of subject matter to have a consistent style like me, for example, but I know a lot of photographers really are drawn to shooting one specific thing, and having subject matter g true throughout all of your images is probably the easiest way to have a consistent style. It's not necessary, but it's definitely one of the easier ways to do it. So write down your answer to this question. Next up is, what kind of light colors or moods are you most drawn to? What do you feel most comfortable with when you look at a photo? Maybe you're really drawn to really dramatic warm sunsets like me, or maybe you're drawn to photos at Blue hour, and you like this really soft and kind of vibe, moody look in your images, or maybe you like photos that were taken in the middle of the day and they're just really bright and airy and open. And the same goes for colors. Are you more into kind of muted tone down colors or are you into very vibrant and loud colors that kind of dominate the scene and kind of take over that photograph a little bit. Our preferences for light and color are often a direct reflection of our personalities. So this is a really important question for us to ask because it does give us a really solid foundation for the style that we want to pursue. Especially when you look at my work, for example, yes, I'm shooting a ton of different subject matters, my use of light and color and exposure are all very similar in my images. And I think that's probably one of the most defining features of my style. And for the last question, and perhaps the most important question that you should ask yourself is what drew you to photography in the first place? Why did you pick up a camera? What are your intentions with photography? Did you start photography to document your life? Did you do it to capture something beautiful as a way of creative expression? Did you do it to capture photos of a hobby or something that you're really interested in and you wanted to document that process? Whatever it is, write this down as well. Asking yourself this question can really reveal your true motivations with photography, and it gives you a lot of clarity as to what you actually want to pursue with your photos. And if you take your answer to this question and you combine it with question three, which is your light and color preferences, question two, which is what you actually want to shoot in the subject matter that you're drawn to. And question one, which is focused on the emotions that you want to tell with your story, this already gives you such a solid blueprint for the style that you want to pursue. I really do love this exercise. I think it's crucial for us to kind of look inward a little think about our actual intentions with photography because ultimately, like I said before, your style is a direct reflection of you, and I think it's always important for us to start with ourselves first before we start looking outward. So with that said, let's move on to the next lesson of this course. We're going to talk about preferences, and we're going to build a super detailed mood board that has all of the photos that we love the most. Let's jump into that. 6. Step Two: Solidifying Your Preferences (Class Project): Guys. So in the last lesson, that was very much an inward practice, right, searching for our purpose, asking ourselves why we got into photography in the first place to give us a little bit more clarity on the direction that we might want to go. But the second step is to look outward, right, and try to find some images that we just think are absolutely stunning. And I talked a little bit about this in learning how to read image video, but it's incredibly important for us to consume good work, work that inspires us. And this is not just in the form of photography. Photography is the main one because that's the medium that we're practicing, but this could be in the form of film. It could be in the form of music, and it can be in other art forms as well. And one of the things that I've found throughout my career is the more that I consume good work and I pay attention to that work and I look deeper at that work, certain stylistic elements from those images that I love most slowly start to show up in my work as well. So in this video, I want you guys to create a super detailed moodboard with all of the photos that inspire most. And I'm going to show you guys mine here right now. This is what I call my vision vault. This is where I put all of the photos that massively inspire me, and I have them all in one place. And I've slowly built this, over the course of the last few years. Sometimes I'll go in and I'll change images out. But this is always at my fingertips here that I can just go in, look at these images, kind of break them down, and remind myself, this is the direction that I want to go in as a photographer. I built this using an app called Milne. You guys can sign up. It's completely free. I'll put a link in the description of this course so you guys can check it out and try it out for yourself. But one of the reasons why I love it is because it's a blank canvas and you can do absolutely whatever you want to it. So you can put photos in here. You could put text in here. You can put music in here, and you can also do things like color schemes as well. You have all these different things on the side here that you can drag in. You could leave a comment. It's just a very kind of interactive canvas, which is great for creative people like us. Like we like to have everything kind of laid out in front of us. And for me, this is what I want to see when I look at my mood. Um so taking a look at some of these images here, I think you'll notice a few themes here. Once again, we see that kind of dark and moody vibe. That's something I've always been interested in. A lot of cars, a lot of kind of vintage looking photos because I am massively inspired by film. Then you'll also see a color focus in a lot of these images. This image here with the deep blues and then the complimentary colors in the sand there. That's something I'm really interested in. I like to see a little bit of dynamic shots as well. So you see the slow motion shutter speed shots here with the porch and this car here. And then once again, just these kind of poetic thoughtful scenes like we see up here in these top two photos, just super cool images that make you look twice and make you think about that image a little bit more. And while all of these images, you know, they might not all have the same style, they all kind of fit the vibe that I'm after, which is capturing this kind of solemn, interesting, nostalgic, poetic vibe in my images. And that's why I have all these images but I want you guys to create a vision vault just like this, using photos that you find online. And when you're doing this exercise, I don't want you to overthink it. If you see an image that looks good, put it into your mood board. We're not going to break this down yet. We're going to just put photos in there that we think that we like, and then we'll go in and kind of read them a little bit more and think about why we like those things. Now, I'm going to show you quickly how to do that using meal note. The easiest way is there's something called a Meline web clipper and you install it using Google Chrome. And when you find an image online that you like and you want to add to your moodboard, all you have to do is go in and click that image. So, for example, this is my photo on Instagram, and then something in the top hand left corner will pop up and says, save. You click Save there. And then this little thing will pop up on the corner here, and then you can directly save it to your vision vault there. So I'm going to click Save there, hit Save. I can go back to Meline here, and then boom, we have the image right here, and then I can just easy drag and drop it into my mood board, move it around wherever I want. You can click on it. You can hide the caption, so it doesn't say Instagram down there, and then I can just easily drag it right down there. So that's a really easy way to do it. You can also really easily just drag and drop photos in here as well. So, for example, I have a few photos here on my desktop. I can just select those and drag and drop them into my moodboard here, and then those will just show up right there, and I can just drag them over here, move them down. So I love Milan note because it allows you to look at, you know, all your inspiration in one place. It's beautiful, and they also have an app as well, which is great. But like I said, also the music. And then if you guys did want to add something like these color schemes here, you can easily do that. All you have to do is click on the color. Click color up here on the left, click the dropper, and then you can go over any part of your image and kind of select some of the colors in those photos. So I think that's pretty cool. It's just another visual element that kind of gives us some sort of inspiration there. But one of the things that I really like to do, and I recommend you doing this as well is writing out themes that you notice from all the photos in your moodboard. So these are some of the common themes that I found with some of the photos that I have here. Emotion, cinematic, nostalgic, rich, moody tones, poetic, dynamic compositions, adventurous, story driven, timeless, and solitude and stillness. And if you're looking at this and you're like, I have no idea what these themes are, one of the things that can really help you here is to take a screenshot of your mood board and then send that to hat ChiPT and say, Hey, ChachiPT, help me out with identifying some of the common themes or some of the common emotions that you're finding with this group of photos, and then you can look at those, find what matches best, and then put that in a text box. And that last point where you're really breaking down all the images and selecting themes is probably the most important part of this process because you're looking at all of these photos and then you're putting it out into words, and that gives you a lot of clarity for the direction that you want to go in as a photographer. And once you've done that, once you've selected those themes, I think it's really important to take a closer look at those images and ask yourself, why do I love them so much? And you can add that into the textbox here. You can create another one, or you can create something like a note. You can drag it over and you can say, I love the dark and moody atmosphere. Of this image. You can drag that there, and then you can create a line and and put an arrow between these two that'll make it nice and easy for you to understand kind of what you were talking about for which specific photo. So it really is just a creative canvas, and that's why I think I love it so much. You can do whatever you want with it. You can put notes anywhere. You can drag things around, and I'm just a huge fan of it, and it's completely free, like I said. So once you do develop your base of your mood board, take a closer look at those photos. Ask yourself why you like them so much because this is where we're really starting to understand what we want to see in a photo. What are the common stylistic elements or what is the common story amongst all of these photos that you want to translate into your work? If you can really lock in your preferences with your moodboard and know exactly what type of look that you want, whether it be a darker exposure, maybe you want bold colors, maybe you want dynamic compositions, maybe you want simple compositions. Whatever it is, the mood board is your opportunity to get a ton of clarity on that, because if you don't have clarity on that, then it's going to be really difficult for you to know which direction to actually go in when you're out shooting and the creative decisions that you're going to make while you're out shooting. So I cannot hammer in the importance of a mood board enough. This is one of the most important pieces for me in finding my unique creative style over the years, it's something that I still reference, and it's something that I'm constantly iterating, as well. And I'm excited to kind of go in and redo this a little bit. I think there's some photos that I can add. I think there's some photos that I can subtract. And one thing you'll notice is I have some of my own photos in here, photos that I'm proud of that reflect the direction that I want to go in as a photographer. I have these two here from California that I shot last year that I just think are so beautiful, so interesting. And that's definitely the direction that I want to go in as a photographer. Now, I want you guys to try this, and I actually want to see your mood boards as well. This is the class project for this course. So go in, whether it's using Milne, you can do this on Instagram and take a screenshot, whatever it is, create a moodboard and post that in the class project section in this course, because I really want to see what you guys are coming up with. So if there's one activity you're going to do in this course, please do this one because it really is the foundation for us to build our style upon. If we don't know what we like to see in a photo how are we going to create a style in the first place? But now that we have a mood board in place, let's move on to the next lesson and talk about how we can translate some of these themes from our mood board, the things that we love and want to see in our photo, how we can translate those things into our own work when we're outshooting. 7. Step Three: Nailing the Process: Far in this course, we've done a lot of reflection. We've looked inward. We've asked ourselves why we got into photography in the first place in hopes to get a little bit of clarity in the direction that we want to go. And we also looked outward, and we found some images that massively inspired us. We put those into our moodboard, and that is also going to give us a ton of clarity on the direction that we want to go with our specific photography style. But none of that really helps us with putting those things into practice. So in this lesson, I want to talk about how we can take some of those themes and some of those stylistic elements that we know that we love in a photo and translate that into our going to preface this lesson by saying, This is very much a learning process. Unless you're a very seasoned photographer and you've been shooting for a long time, you might not necessarily know how to get that specific look in your photo. And I'm telling you right now that is totally okay, because if you're not going out and trying and experimenting and making mistakes, then you're not going to grow as a photographer in the first place. By the end of this lesson, by the end of your next shoot or the next few shoots after that, you might not have your style locked in, and that's totally okay. But if you follow the guidelines that I lay forward in this lesson, I promise you you are setting yourself up for success, and you're going to establish your own unique photography style in time if you're doing these things. Now, one of the things that we did in the last lesson was we took a look at all those images on the moodboard, and we pulled out common themes from all of those images. And those themes are both visual stylistic things that we saw on the photo, such as darker exposure, dynamic compositions, simple compositions, vibrant colors. And we also found some common themes in the story of those images. Now the best way to translate these stylistic elements that we found in our mood board that we really resonate with is to go out and shoot. But there's a few activities that I like to do to kind of simplify this process a little bit. In your mood board, you might have found that you like darker exposures. You might have found that you like vivid colors, and maybe you like simple compositions. Well, I think it's really important to break those down and focus on one thing each day while you're shooting. So maybe you have ten themes that you notice in your mood just select one and go out and focus on that. Putting creative constraints on yourself like this really simplifies the process of you trying to incorporate these stylistic elements into your own photos. If you go out and you have all of these themes on your mind, a list of things that you want to translate into your work, it's going to be next to impossible to do all of that. But if you break it down one by one and you dedicate a day of shooting to a single one of those themes that you found in your mood board, that simplification is going to make it so much easier for you to translate those things into your. You might be taking a look at your mood board here and thinking, Shawn, I have 20 different themes here and some of them are quite abstract. I don't know how I can practically put these things into a photograph. That's why I think you should be focusing on some of the more tangible things. If I had to give you a guideline to follow, I would focus on all of the stylistic elements of photography. Those would be composition, lighting, subject matter. Color. Because once again, those four stylistic elements of photography all work together to tell the story in a photo. And if you can nail all of those stylistic elements across your entire body of work, a natural story will emerge in your photos, and I can guarantee you that your photos will match the look of your mood board. So let's break this down a little bit more and look at some concrete examples for how you guys can do this. And starting off with composition, if you were looking at your mood board and you noticed some common themes and the compositions of those photos, for example, maybe one of the things that you noticed is they're quite dynamic and they're quite interesting. They use a lot of leading lines in those photos that are kind of guiding your eyes back through the frame or maybe they're really good at depth, and they're showing several subjects at different depths throughout the frame that help tell the story in the composition, or maybe they're also kind of abstract and messy. These are all things that you can pick up on with composition. And once you identify those commonalities in the compositions of those photos, go out for a single day and only shoot with composition on your mind. And this basically means you're completely ignoring lighting, you're ignoring subject matter, you're ignoring color, you're ignoring everything else except for composition to the point where you can take a photo that might not even be beautiful be a random bench on the side of the road for all I care. It doesn't matter as long as you're thinking deeply about the composition of that photo. Another good example here is lighting. A lot of the time, it can be quite difficult for us to focus on lighting because there's so much color. There's so many things happening in the scene. So one of the best ways to focus on light is to set your camera in black and white and shoot in black and white for a day, because when you're shooting in black and white, all you see is light, and all you see are tones. So that's a really great way to kind of eliminate all of the other distracting elements from a photograph and focus 100% on the light in your one of the things that you might get hung up on here is trying to pull out all of these common themes. Maybe you did the activity in the Moodboard lesson, but you still feel like you're having a hard time finding commonalities. Then don't look at your entire mood board. Just look at one photo. Take a look at one photo that you absolutely love that massively inspires you and break it down. What time of day was that photo taken out? What are some of the colors that you see in that image? What's the composition like? What was the focal length they shot once you've broken down that photo, then take that and go out and try to mimic that photo. For some of you, this might be an easier activity because you can just focus on one thing and you can really pull apart every little aspect of that image and try to figure out how to capture a photo that's very similar to it. And regardless of which approach you take, you might not always have the knowledge to get that look that you're after, and that's why I always recommend just digging a little bit deeper. If there's a photographer you are massively inspired by and you love their work. Go to their Instagram, look at their story highlights, try to figure out how they shot these photos and the creative techniques that they used to capture that specific look. You can learn a lot from a photographer's Instagram. You can often see behind the scenes, sometimes they have educational reels that will give you a bit of a glimpse into their creative process. So you might not have all the answers right away. You might not know how to get that specific look. But like I said before, this is a learning experience. And if you do a little bit of research, you ask some other photographers how they think this photo was shot, then eventually, I promise you you will nail that look as well. Really do think it is incredibly important for us to simplify this process. Don't look at your mood board and go out and try to capture all of these themes in one day. Break it down day by day, spend one day focusing on composition. Spend one day focusing on light, spend a day focusing on subject matter and spend a day focusing on color. And if you do this multiple times, you are going to train your brain to prefer certain things in your images. And then when you go out and shoot and you're not thinking about these things, they're naturally going to show up cannot hammer in how much of an important process this is for us. We learn so much when we put creative constraints on ourself as photographers, and I know personally that I have grown a lot going out with one lens and focusing on just one single thing for that day. Those themes start to translate themselves into my work, and my style has become the way it is because I've put creative constraints on myself in the past. Like I said before, this is very much a learning process. You're not going to be able to finish this course and just have your style right away. You actually have to go out and shoot, and I really hope that this lesson gives you a little bit of clarity on the actual process that you can follow to finding your own unique style. You're not going to get better. You're not going to find your style if you don't go out and shoot and make mistakes and try to mimic things that you love in other photos. That's where the most important learning takes place during your career. And I know, for me, when I was first starting out and I was shooting, I was trying to copy other photographers because that's the look that I wanted, and I was trying to get similar lighting scenarios. I was shooting with similar lenses in an effort to get the same I learned so much early on doing those things as a photographer. But I really hope this lesson was helpful for you guys. I absolutely love this activity, but it's not the end of the road for us. There's another very important step that we need to follow when we're in pursuit of our own unique photography style. So let's talk about that now. 8. Step Four: Progression: Guys, well, we have made it to the last step in finding your unique photography style, and I like to call this step the progression step. Now, the thing about style is it's an ever evolving process, and it never really ends. And you're going to go through this progression where your style kind of slowly evolves over time. And I think one of the best things that we can do is frequently take a look back at the work that we've recently shot and kind of gauge where we're at and make sure that we're going in the direction that we want to go. If you've followed all the steps in this course, and you're going out and you're actively shooting and you're trying to get better and you're learning new things, the best thing you can do is do the same activity that we did in the style lesson of this course. So I want you to choose 20 photos that you shot over the last 30 days. Now, now all of these photos have to be like your favorite photos. I would say choose some of your favorite photos that you shot over the last month, but also choose some photos that aren't your favorites as well. Once you have those photos in front of you, ask yourself those same three questions. The first one is what visual choices stand out to you in those photos? Is it the light? Is it the color? Is it the composition? Is it the subject matter? What do you like about those images? What are the stylistic choices that you specifically like about those images? Second question is, what emotions do those photos convey, right? Coming back to that idea of how do those photos make you feel. And lastly, are there any patterns that you notice between all of these images? And these patterns can be in the form of a visual style, like the way the photos actually look, but they can also be related to story as well and kind of some of the overarching themes that you might notice in this collection of photos. Once you've answered these questions, I want you to ask yourself, Okay, what worked over the past month? What have I done really well this month? And also, where have I fallen short? What didn't work in some of these images? If we look back at the original definition of style, right? It's the consistent use of specific stylistic elements that we use across our entire body of work. And the keyword here is consistency. If you take the time to truly review your images and notice what you did really well and then consistently keep doing those things out into the future, your style is going to very quickly naturally emerge the reason why I like this activity so much is because we can repeat it month after month every month throughout the course of our entire photography career. And you can go and you can look back at older images and say, Wow, this is where I was at the time. It's really interesting to see where I am now and the progression that I've had to get to this point. So, for example, maybe all of your favorite images over that past month were shot at sunset. Well, that tells you right there that maybe you should be shooting at Sunset more, or maybe all of your favorite photos from the last month were shot on a 50 millimeter lens. Well, double down and start using that 50 millimeter lens more because it's very clear that you really vibe with that specific focal. One of the things you'll notice throughout this course is I'm continuously having you guys look at your images at a deeper level and continuously evaluate them. And this is because, like I said earlier, if you're truly looking at an image and you're evaluating that image and you're looking deeper at it, you're going to make both a conscious and a subconscious note of what you like in those images, and then the next time you go out and shoot, it's going to be instinctive for you. Even if you're not specifically chasing a certain look, your brain will start to default and seek that look out automatically. And that is really the point that you want to be in with style. It's where you're not even thinking about style anymore because you've trained your brain so much to know what looks good, to know what you want to have in your image and every time you go out and shoot, that's exactly what you shoot for. So you might not think that this activity is all that practical, but I can promise you that this activity is just as important as the activity of actually going out and shooting and learning how to get a specific look. And this is an activity that we can repeat every month. So choose a day at the end of every month, at the beginning of every month, whatever it is, and start consistently reviewing your work not only to track your progression, but to make sure you're headed in the right direction. With that said, I did want to add on another practical lesson to the end of this course, and that is all about editing, right? A huge part of the creative process for us as photographers is the editing process. Now, I'm not going to give you guys a super detailed breakdown on how to use light room, but I will show you a few hacks that can make it easier for us to have a more consistent look across our entire body of work. So let's move on to that lesson now. 9. The Importance of Editing: So far in this course, we've talked a lot about the stylistic elements of photography, things like lighting, color, composition, subject matter, and how when we keep all of these stylistic elements consistent throughout our work, our style will naturally emerge. But one thing we haven't talked about is the editing phase. And this phase is incredibly important for us because it allows us to really shape and manipulate our images to make sure they match even better. We can adjust the lighting to make sure it matches. We can adjust the composition through and we can also adjust the color in that image as well. Now, of course, there's going to be things that you can't change about the image. The shooting phase is very, very important. But there is a lot that we can do in the editing phase. So in this video, I want to jump on the computer and show you guys a few different hacks that you can use to make sure that your work is more consistent. So let's jump on the computer and I'll show you guys how to for this course, I am using ight room Classic. Now, there's 1 million different editing softwares out there. Generally speaking, Lightroom Classic is one of the more popular ones. It's used by many different photographers. And if you guys aren't familiar with Light room, I would highly recommend checking it out. They do have a normal version of Lightroom, and then they have Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic is a slightly more robust editing software. I'm not going to talk about the differences too much, but I would recommend classic. But if you guys do want to edit on Lightroom or any other software, you can still follow along super easily. Now, the first tip I have for having a more consistent editing style is to use Lightroom presets. Now, lightroom presets are basically like fancy editing filters that you can apply to your photo, and then you can make changes to make sure it matches that photo now, to show you guys this, I have four different images here shot in four different places. This is in Japan. Let me reset that edit there. This was shot in Japan. This was shot on the Coast in California. And I guess these ones were shot on the coast in California as well, but they're all kind of very different images. This one's shot in owight and these ones are shot at sunset, and this one was shot in the middle of the day on an overcast day. So one of the beauties of presets is when we apply a preset, it really adds kind of a foundation to our image that we can go ahead and make changes to after that. Now, I have a bunch of different presets here. There's a ton of different presets that you can download online. Many of them are free. Light room gives you a bunch of free presets as well that you can experiment with. But I have a bunch of packs that I sell on my website, and I also have a free preset pack that you guys can actually go and download on my website as well. I will put a on the screen, and I'll also put a link in the description of this course. And I will use these to show you guys how using one preset across multiple images will allow us to keep somewhat of a consistent look across those photos. Now, I'm going to start off with this photo here in Japan. This is my free preset pack, and I have six presets in here, and I'm just going to kind of go through each one. So this is clean minimal. This is crisp colors. You can see lots of vibrant colors in this one. I really like that. We have dark and moody, really vibe, super dark. We have nostalgic film. Oh I love the way that looks. We have portrait mood, and we have warm portrai, which I also really like. I'm going to go ahead and apply warm portra. I think warm portra just looks really good. It looks super warm and vibe, and I like how soft it is. It kind of looks like film, which is why I created this preset was to make it look like film. But we're not done here, right? One of the things that I like to do after I apply a preset is to go down the list and think about all the things in that image. We have lighting, we have color, we have composition, and we have subject matter. Now, obviously, we can't change the subject matter in this photo unless we want to remove someone from the image, but we're not going to do that today. So I'm going to go ahead and crop that image to a four by five, which is best for Instagram. Leave that there. And it's also dark, which I really like, but it might be a little bit too dark, so I'm going to raise the exposure a little bit, maybe raise the shadows a little bit, and then I'm going to reduce that clarity but minus five. Honestly, this photo looks good already. Like, this is kind of a one and done, but this isn't really a good example for presets because presets aren't always one and done, and you need to make some changes. So let's move on to the next photo here. I will apply that same preset. And you can see this looks really cool. But if I go back here, we're losing so much of that blue. Now, I really do love warmth in my images, but I also want those natural colors to come through, as well. So one of the things I'm going to do here is immediately come up here to the white balance adjustment, and I'm going to lower that down to make sure that we have some of that blue sky coming through. I'm also going to increase the exposure a little bit. I'm also going to come down here to saturation, and I'm going to ramp that up. Unfortunately, it's doing some weird things to these reds, so I'm actually going to undo that. And then I'm going to come down here to the HSL sliders, and I'm going to increase the orange and the yellow because we have a lot of oranges and yellows here in this image, and I'm also going to increase the blue so that blue sky will really come out there. And already, I think that looks a lot more interesting. Let's go back up here, maybe increase the vibrant, see what that does. That's a little bit too much. So maybe we come back up to the temperature adjustment, raise that up a little bit, and then I'm going to crop this by four by five, straighten it out, so the bottles nice and straight. And there's the before, there's the after. I think we can play around with this image a little more, spending a little bit more time on really dialing in those colors. And one of the things that I'm doing when I'm editing is I'm spending a lot of time on color. Color is such a massive part of the creative process for us as photographers, and I really like to manipulate the colors in my images. And there's a few different ways that you can do that. Obviously, in the basic adjustments here, you have the vibrance and the saturation and the temperature, which does so much to your image. But if you want to do a little bit more, you can come down here to the color mixer where you can adjust the hue, which is the actual hue of that color. Can adjust the saturation, which is how pure that color is, the saturation of that color, and then we can also adjust the luminance, which is the brightness of that color. Now, I think the luminance values look pretty good for all these colors. I think the hues look really nice. Maybe if we want to adjust the blue in the sky, we could by dragging that blue hue slider a little bit, but I think it looks pretty good, to be honest. The last way that we can edit color is with the color grading panel. And I really like to do this. And with the color grading panel, we can essentially add colors into certain tonal ranges of our images. So, for example, we have the midtones, we have the shadows, and we have the highlights. If I drag this up, you can see it's putting a lot of warmth into those shadows. Same thing for the highlights here. If I drag this up, it's putting kind of a light blue into the sky there, which I think looks really nice. But generally speaking, I think this image looks good. I just do want more of that warmth to come through. So raise that warmth up a little bit, maybe come back here to the blue and raise that up again. And I you might be thinking, Sean, when you first opened this image, you reduced the temperature. You made it more cool, and now you're undoing that and you're making it warm again. Well, the editing process is very iterative. You're going to be messing around, kind of playing around to get the look that you want. You're never going to go in and just make an adjustment and know that it's going to be right right away. You have to experiment, you have to try things out, and eventually you will land on a look that looks good to you. And to me, I think this looks pretty good. Let's move on to the next image here, and this is another photo that I shot on the California coast. I absolutely love this photo. It's so cool. I was freaking out when I shot this photo because it was just such a cool thing to see. So I'm going to go ahead and apply that same preset, the warm portrait preset. Honestly, this looks pretty good. I'm going to start off with a crop here. Make sure we get our composition right. I want to make sure we get those birds in the top there as well. Alright, I think that looks pretty good. Maybe bring that back out. Okay. So we have a really good base here, but I want to start off with lighting first. It is a little bit dark, so I'm going to raise that exposure a little bit here. Maybe bring the highlights down, the hair. I really want to kind of maintain that soft film look. And then temperature wise, I think we're good here. I am going to come down here and maybe play around with a contrast a little bit, maybe increase some contrast there, really make those birds pop. And now that's really bringing out the blues in the sky, so I'm going to come back up here to the temperature and I'm actually going to make that warmer again. I really kind of want that nostalgic, warm feeling in this image. And already this image looks so good. One thing I would like to do here is looking at these plants. I might want to try and pull those colors apart a little bit because we do have some green and some gold here, and I think it might be nice to kind of pull them apart and really let those green shine and those gold shine it'll just look really good. So I'm going to come down to the hue slider here. I'm going to go down to the orange because this is definitely orange and probably yellow, as well. And I'm going to adjust that. And I think maybe a little bit towards the orange side, and then coming down to yellow, maybe just a hair towards the green side there, and then coming towards the green, maybe just a hair towards the green side there. Actually, I'm going to leave that there. I think this looks pretty good. Honestly, there's the before, there's the after. I definitely matches those first two images that we had as well. But one thing I would like to do, as well, these images are quite dark and moody, so I'm going to go ahead and come here to the selective adjustments. I'm going to create a linear gradient, and then I'm going to drag that over the bottom part of our image. And why this is so great is because it allows us to edit one specific part of our photo. I absolutely love the selective adjustments in light room. And then I'm going to go ahead and just drag that exposure down to really add just a little bit more mood to this image, a little bit more vibe. I think that looks pretty cool. Last thing I want to do is maybe play around with those blues a little bit. So come here to the HSL, go to blue and maybe drag that maybe a little bit towards the left, just a little tiny bit. And, boom, I think that looks pretty good. There's a before, there's the after. And last but certainly not least, this photo was shot at Blue hour. Absolutely love this photo, but we have a lot of really interesting colors in this photo that I want to bring out that are not showing up here in the raw photo. So I'm going to apply the warm portrait preset. And I think this looks really good, but it's pushing this image a little bit too far to the point where we're not getting that blue in the sky. I remember shooting this and thinking, Wow, that blue sky is so beautiful. I want to make that blue pop with kind of the gold reflection on this car here. So I'm going to go ahead and crop this image to a four by five. That looks pretty good. There's actually a dog in the window, as well. You can see him there. Zoomed in super far, but it was really cute. So, the first thing I'm gonna play around with here is maybe the temperature. I'm gonna drag that and make it more blue. But I feel like that's kind of eliminating a lot of the warmth from this image as well. So I'm going to undo that. Maybe try coming down here to the HSL sliders and maybe just pumping the blue. I actually like that a lot better. Just really saturating that blue in the sky there, maybe the aqua, as well. And already, this looks so cool. We can also come down here to the contrast slider, increase that contrast, make it super just dark and vibe, really punchy, as well. That's kind of one of the look that I'm going for here. And then maybe come down to the vibrant slider and increase that as well. And just like that, I mean, the images night and day from what? That was like three adjustments. So here's the before, here's the after. And there's so much more color. This is how I remember it in the scene. And also, because we didn't change all that much, we still have that base from that preset that we're using across all of these images. So all of these photos will match together. And if I come here and go to RA here, we can compare some of these images. I'll drag this one here. More or less, it matches. If these were both on your feed, they would match together, same with these images. So this is a really good way to kind of keep a consistent look across your images is to use presets. And one of the beauties of it is once you're using a preset across all of your images, you might start to make some changes to those presets, and you might have like three or four presets that are essentially the same with just a few small changes that work in different environments. For example, I have my essentials preset collection, which you can get through my light room master class, and this is the presets that I'm using in a lot of my images, and I have a few different variations. So I love the everyday color preset, but I have slightly different variations of that preset just to work across a wider range of images. So when you're going and you're editing your images and you create a preset, you can create several variations of that preset that will work across a lot of your images. Now, real quick, I just want to change something real quick. The sky is too purple, and I'm noticing that's driving me a little bit crazy. So I'm going to come down here to blue and drag that maybe towards this way a little bit. Okay, now I want to show you how to create a preset. So once you've got all your settings kind of dialed in here, all you have to do is come up here to develop new preset, and then you can create a preset. So I can name this Cali Coast V one, for example, you can check all, and then you can save this in whatever pack you want. I'm currently working on a film preset pack that is not released yet, but I can save it there, or I can create a new collection if I wanted to come up here and say California presets. Boom, create that. There we have the version one. And then if I wanted to change a few things, for example, then I can go ahead and create another preset. Calicos V two. Boom. And now we have V one and V two. So presets really are a fantastic way for us to kind of keep that consistent look across our images. And like I said, if you guys do want to download these presets, I'll put a link down to the description, or you can click on that link right there. But there is another technique that I think takes this one very big step further, and this is something that I recommend all photographers do when they're trying to learn editing, and that is deconstructing images from other photographers that we really look up to. There's a few steps to this process, so try your best to follow along here, and I promise you guys will take something very valuable from this lesson. Now, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go to Instagram or we're going to go to our moodboard, and we're going to find a photographer whose images that we really look up to. We really like their editing style. We just love those images, and we want to capture something similar in our photos. So we're going to go ahead and I'm going to show you guys, for example, this is my Instagram page, and I'm going to go ahead and find four images that I just think look really cool and match the style that I want to go for in my edits. So I'll go ahead and find this one, love this image. I'm going to go ahead and right click and save that image. Image one, for example. And then I'm going to do this with three other images that have an editing style that I like. Now, ideally, all these images are relatively similar. You don't include a photo that was shot in the desert, a photo that was shot in the Arctic, for example. You're not going to be able to find trends between those photos, but just find four images that you think represent that photographer the best, and then we're going to open up a software called Canva and put all those images together, and I'll show you how to do that. Canva is fantastic because it makes it easy for us to create a collage of some of our favorite images. Now you can also do this with so many other softwares. You can do this with Photoshop. You can do this with 1 million different applications as well. But I'm going to show you how I created this one here. Now, I'm going to go to Home here. I'm going to create a new design. I'm going to go to Instagram post here, and that's going to open up a four by five aspect to ratio post. And then I'm going to come over here to templates, and you're going to find a bunch of different templates here. There's so many different templates that you can use. But one of the things that I'm looking for is just photos, right? I just want to show three, two, three, four photos. This is a good example if one of the photos that you downloaded was landscape, and the other two were portrait. Here's another example of, you know, four portrait orientation photos. But I want to keep it nice and clean, and I'm going to come back here and I'm going to select one because it just has four clean photos. They look good. Now, I don't want the borders here, so I'm going to go ahead and go to spacing and just reduce that to zero, and then I'm going to drag that out so it fits the corners. Boom. Now what we can do is we can go to uploads, and then we can upload the files that we downloaded from our favorite photographer. So I'm going to go ahead and go to Downloads here. You can see I have Image one. I can download that. But I actually have all of those images uploaded here for you guys to see. And then all I have to do is drag and drop the photo over the other photo, and it will replace it, and then we can create a collage of some of our favorite images from that specific photographer. Now, I already created one here, and these are four images that I think represent my style really well, especially right now, we kind of have a darker moodier look. We have a lot of warmth in those images. They're kind of vibe. They're almost film like, but they're definitely darker, which is just the vibe that I like in my photography. Now, once you create your little mood board here, what you're going to do is go to Share. You're going to download that, and I like to download it as a JPEG, make the size up a little bit, make the quality 100, and then you're going to go ahead and click Download. And then you're going to open Light room up again, and you're going to come up here and go to File, Import photos and video Then you can just go to your downloads folder and simply drag and drop that into Lightroom and hit Import. And then that photo will show up as an imported photo in Lightroom. And why this is so great is because now we can put this up against an image that we're currently editing, and we can try to copy all the different stylistic elements in that photo. Now, the easiest way to do this is to create a collection. Now, I organize all of my images via collections by year. You can see I have a bunch of different collections here for different videos that I've done and things like that. Once you have that image, you can create a collection, drag that in there. And as you can see, I have some photos here that I'm going to edit, I already put these photos into this collection. If you want to add a photo into a collection, you simply drag and drop it into the collection. It's super easy to use, and this is my favorite way of organizing my images here in Light room. But once we have this, we're going to go ahead and click on the image that we want to edit, and then we're going to go up here to the Develop panel. We're going to click down here on the RA and then simply drag and drop our reference photo next to the photo that we're going to be editing. And now we have the images that inspire us most sitting directly next to the image that we want to edit in that same style. So this is such a great activity for us to do. The first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and crop this image. It's going to make you leave this reference panel. That's okay. Come back to that. Ben that looks good. Bring up that reference panel again. And then I'm going to start off with removing some of this dust here. I'm going to hit Q on my keyboard, and I'm going to go to this little healing tool and then just click on some of these little dust spots here. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. Now, there's a few different ways that you can go about this. You can go ahead and look through your collection of presets and see if anything kind of matches, you know, scrolling down all the presets, and if one of them kind of matches the look that you're after, just use that. But I'm going to edit this from scratch to show you guys how we can kind of deconstruct these edits from start to finish. And the easiest way to do this is to focus on all the different stylistic elements in order, starting off with lighting and making sure that the lighting in our scene kind of matches our reference images here and then moving on to color and then moving on to detail and texture as well. Things like grain, for example, we should always be looking out for those things in our edits as well. Now, starting off with light here, generally speaking, the light is very similar in these scenes. And if you noticed earlier on in this course that all of your favorite images were shot at sunset, and you're shooting at sunset, you're already going to be so close to those colors because the colors at Sunset are just so dramatic and interesting. So this already gives us such a good starting point for the fact that this was shot at sunset here, but I do think there are some changes that we can make to the lighting in this image. And when we're talking about lighting, we're talking about a few things. We're talking about exposure or the brightness of that image. We're talking about the contrast or the differences between the bright and the dark areas of that photo. And we're also talking about the black and the white point. So how soft are those blacks and also how soft are those whites and vice versa? Now, we're going to start off with exposure. I'm going to bring that up just a hair. Too much because I noticed that while these are darker images, they're still well exposed. You can still see a lot in those images, minus this kind of bottom part here, in this photo and also the sides here in this photo. Those are pretty dark. I'm going to bring that exposure up a little bit. I also noticed that the highlights are quite soft in these images, so I'm going to bring those highlights down just to hair, maybe bring the shadows up a little bit. And then I'm going to leave the white and black points here for now. Instead, I'm going to come down here to the tone curve, which gives us huge amounts of flexibility with editing the tones in our image. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Option on my keyboard, and then I'm going to click three times on this tone curve here, and I'm going to create a little S curve. So I'm going to come down here to the shadow section of the tone curve, drag that down a little bit. I'm going to leave the mid tones there, and I'm going to bring up the highlights here. And that's going to add just a ton of contrast to our image that you can't really do with the basic adjustments. It's just going to add a lot more interest to that image. I'm going to come up here to the top right, and I'm going to drag that down. And you can see that's kind of softening out that white point up in the sky there, the top right. And then we can also do that with the bottom, and that's going to soften out those blacks. But you need to be careful here because when I'm looking at these blacks, they're not that soft, maybe just a little bit. I'm going to bring blacks up just a little tiny bit. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe bring the blacks up here, bring the whites down here, just kind of moving around, trying to get everything to match. And I think the light is looking pretty good. But the colors definitely do not match. You can see the blues here, definitely very different blues. So now we're going to move on to color. And the thing that I like to start with here is the temperature slider here. We can raise that up and make that more warm because a lot of these images are quite warm here. I'm going to raise it up just a little bit. I don't want to do too much here. And then I'm going to come down here to the HSL sliders, and I'm going to kind of work through all of the main colors in our image. Now, in this photo, you can see we mainly have warm tones, like these warm rocks, which are very orange and yellow. And then we also have the blue sky. There's not really a whole lot else going on here. So I'm going to start off with orange, see what that does to the image. I can make it more red or I can make it more yellow. It looks quite unnatural each way. But looking at the kind of orangish, yellowish goldish tones here, I think we can leave it maybe plus four, something like that. Actually, I'm going to leave that there. Move on to yellow here. I think we can bring that down maybe minus eight or so. I'm going to leave the green, but I am going to come down here to the blue, and I'm going to drag that over to the left a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. The blue is a little bit strong. So I'm going to come down here to saturation, and I'm going to desaturate that blue a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe play around with the orange as well. I don't want too much color. It's pretty bold already. Already, this is looking so good. But one of the things I can tell when I look at these images are there's a little bit more color depth, and you can do this using the color grading panel here. Now, like I said before, the color grading panel allows us to really add colors into certain tonal ranges of our images, and I can see these kind of have a warmer tint over them. So I'm going to come down here to midtones. I'm going to start off with that. And I'm going to experiment with adding a little bit of warmth into those midtones. And already, that's just adding a lot of color interest to this image, which I think looks really good. Maybe experiment with the highlights as well, maybe adding a little bit of warmth into those highlights as well. Oh, yeah, that just adds so much more color depth into this photo. I think it looks so good. And then we're losing a little bit too much blue, so I might come back in and readd some of that blue in there. Boom, I think that looks so nice already. And just like that, I mean, this really does match these images almost perfectly. So I really like the way this looks. But of course, I think these images have a bit of grain as well. So let me zoom in here. You can see we have a bit of a grain here, kind of gives a little bit of texture, a little bit of interest. So I'm going to come down here to effects and maybe increase the grain by maybe 15, 16, and that's just going to add a little bit more texture to this image, which a lot of these images have texture, and texture is something that I really like to add into my images. And, boom, you can see this image just looks perfect next to these other images, and it immediately fits my style. And that's kind of the power of putting your reference photos directly up against the photo that you're currently editing. And looking at another example photo here this is a photo that I shot in Portugal. And you can already see it kind of matches the style already, and this just goes to show how important it is to really think about all these things before you actually go out and shoot. You know, this is my style. This is just what I see when I'm out shooting. I look for these singular subjects with strong light pouring through the image, that warm, kind of golden light pouring through the image. This is just something that I am constantly searching for while I'm shooting. But of course, the editing is where we kind of bring it all together, right? So doing the same process here, focusing on the light. Honestly, the light already looks good in this image. I might just bring the exposure up, bring the highlights down a hair, and maybe warm it up a little bit. And, I mean, immediately, this image kind of already fits the images that we have in our reference board. So there's really not a whole lot that I need to do to it. Maybe adjust the tone curve a little bit. But I think you guys get the point here. This is an activity that I think you should really try out. And I actually have been doing this activity for years, and I made a video on YouTube called How to Edit Like A photographer. I'll put a link down in the description as well, where you guys can see me doing this same process about four or five years ago. It still works. Light room might look a little bit different, but all the principles still apply. And if you want to see more examples of this activity, I highly recommend checking out. But I really hope that this video was helpful for you guys. Editing really is such a huge part of the creative process, and I wish that I could sit here and teach you guys how to use light room from start to finish, but I do have a ton of free resources on my YouTube channel, and also please go download my free presets, as well. I think you guys will love those. But that is all for this video, guys. Let's move on to the next and final lesson. 10. Remember this one thing.: Alright, guys, well, we have made it to the end of this course. And before you go, I want to leave you with a few thoughts that I think you should definitely keep in mind going forward. And the first one is style, like I said before, is an ever evolving process. And by the end of this course, you're not necessarily going to have your own unique style right away, just like that. It's going to take time. It's going to effort, and it's going to take actually going out and shooting and reviewing your images and consuming good images as well from other photographers that you really look up to and that you want to learn from. If you're actively engaging with this process and with the creative process of photography, your style will naturally develop over time, and it's also going to grow and evolve beyond that, too, into things that you might not even be able to anticipate at this point in time. But circling back to that idea of consuming good images and consuming good art and just identifying photos that actually inspire us earlier on in this course, we talked about the Moodboard. I think that's an amazing way for us to kind of the images in front of us. But even if you're not putting it in front of you, just consuming it and paying attention to it will help you train your brain as to what actually looks good in a photo. And there's so many different places that we can gather inspiration from. One of the places that I like to do so is with books and actually have a few photography books back here. The first one is from a photographer who I absolutely love by the name of Joe Howard, and he shoots a lot of medium format and also 35 millimeter film, specifically in the Mediterranean. Work just massively inspires me. And sometimes when I'm not feeling all that inspired with my work, I'll just sit down and take a look at some of the photobooks that I have. Joe's is one of my favorites. But perhaps one of the most important things that I've done in my photography career was create my own photobook. And this is not for sale. This is just for me, but it has a collection of all of my favorite photos that I shot in 2021. It's kind of like my 2021 photography yearbook. And I've gone through, and I've started creating these for every year, as well. And this is just such a fun and interesting way to look back in time and see what your style was like that specific moment in time. Some of my favorite images I ever shot were in 2021. But when I look at them now, I see them and I'm like, Oh, you know, maybe I would have edited these photos differently. Maybe I would have gone about this composition in a slightly different way. You know, whatever it is, I absolutely love having these yearbooks. And if you guys really want to grow your style and creatively engage with the photography process, I cannot recommend doing something like this enough. Maybe it's every year, maybe it's every two years, whatever it is, I love this activity, and I think you guys should definitely try it out. Just one last tip I wanted to leave you guys with before this course closes out. And I just want to say thank you so much for watching to the end of this course. If you guys do want to continue learning from me, I have a ton of free photography content on my YouTube channel about photography, editing, travel photography, a little bit of everything. So I'll put a link in the description of this course. You guys can go check that out. And also, I have a ton of free things that you can download on my website, as well. I'll put links to those As Ball. I have a free gear guide, I have free presets. I have a Travel photographers Toolkit. I have just a bunch of different things that can help you on your photography journey. So definitely go check those once again, thank you guys so much for watching until the end of this course. I really hope to see you in some of my other courses, and I will chat with you again very soon.