The Secret to Finding Your Unique Style Through Projects

I've spoken about style and creativity in recent podcasts and I realise that some people don't think of themselves as creative and feel they don't have a style at all.

 So, my suggestion to you is that you accept that you are creative (possibly not the most creative person you know, but it's there all the same) and that you give yourself permission to try some new ideas!

A great way to develop your style and begin your creative journey is to do a challenge. In this podcast, I talk about four:

The Neighbourhood Walk: Limit yourself to going no further than 2km or 1 mile from your home and shoot a series of photographs that tell the story of that area. The purpose of this challenge is to work on your observation skills. What have you overlooked when you've been in this area in the past?

The Urban Exploration: Document a landmark or hidden 'gem'. How can you use composition to create images that tell its story? That might include its' location, fine details or anything else that makes it notable. Again, you're working on observation, composition and communicating what you feel when you are there (mood).

The Travel Series: Limit yourself to 10 (or 12, or 36 images... not 500!) to tell the story of your trip. This works the same 'muscles' as the previous challenges.

One location for one day: Show how an area or subject changes throughout the day. This challenge is concerned with understanding light; how it varies during the day and how you can use it to create a certain look and feel.

And, of course, you can combine these challenges to make them more interesting.

Important note: Please be sure to be aware of local laws about photographing people in public and make sure you follow them.

Why not sign up for my 14-day Challenge? You'll get one email everyday for 14 days, each with a different photography challenge. Sign up here.

It's time for another podcast...

Please take a look at the 2026 Wildlife Calendar. It's available now.

Transcript

>> Graham: 0:08

Foreign. Hello again. Now, this podcast has a bit of a long title, but I thought I'd continue a theme that I've been, talking about over the last few podcasts. So, well, I've sort of disappeared off onto other things every now and again. But essentially what I've been trying to cover is to just present ideas about how to improve your photography, how to develop a style, and really it comes down to having photography activities going on, not necessarily every day, but maybe every week that keep you interested and keep you inspired. And I don't know how you do your photography. I don't know if you're already taking photographs every day or if you tend to wait until that big trip comes along or it's something else. The reason for going through these podcasts where, I'm trying to give you ideas is particularly for those of you who perhaps don't use the camera so much. It's first of all to give you an excuse to use the camera, which I think is actually very important, because the more you use it, the more familiar you are with the gear that you have, the more you learn what it's capable of. And in fact, the more you learn what you're capable of with that particular gear. Because a huge component of any photography kit is the photographer. There used to be, the old saying that the most important part of any photographic kit is the, I don't know, 12 inches behind the viewfinder, but whatever. It's your. But it's your head. It's what's in your head. So that's why I've been kind of going to and fro a little bit back to this subject and to try and encourage you to think creatively if you're not already doing that. That. And the reason that I think that is important is that a lot of people immediately shy away as soon as you start talking about creativity. They immediately put the shutters up. they say, I'm not, creative. I never have been. All that kind of stuff. And you sort of argue for your limitations. And one of the things that I think is important, particularly with something like photography, that is, whether you like it or not, a creative activity is to actually let go of that and just accept that maybe you are more creative than you give yourself credit for. And once you start letting that idea get a bit of currency with you, start letting it in, then I believe that's when you'll start to find that your results get a lot better. So this is about a. Helping you to shoot Certainly photographs that you love, but it may even be photographs that you never even thought you were capable of. And I think that is what I would refer to as a breakthrough. And I've seen people do that in both photography and other areas. So that's what I'm going to talk about a little bit in this podcast. I hope you're still with me and if you are, please, click the like, subscribe, whatever, because that really does help me. the podcast is getting more popular, which is encouraging because I'm most of the time sat here talking to myself. So it's quite nice to feel that people are listening and getting some benefit from it. So you're very welcome to comment, send me an email, whatever you want to do. All of that is very welcome. So I'm going to go back to the subject of challenges now. on the website there's actually a 14 day challenge that you can just register, for. It's just giving you, giving me your email address, address. And then every day for two weeks you will get an email with a particular photography challenge. And the idea is that you just explore this particular aspect of photography for that day. you may not have very long to do it. It doesn't really matter. Most of these can be done pretty quickly, within about 20 minutes, half an hour. And if you've got time that you can do that, if you've got half an hour a day for a, couple of weeks, then that's fine. And one of the reasons for taking on a challenge like this is it's to get, it is, if I can say it, to get you out of your comfort zone, get you shooting something that you wouldn't normally shoot and might make you a little bit uncomfortable when you do it. And this is really another important aspect of growth in any activity or anything you're engaged in. When you start to feel a little bit stretched, a little bit uncomfortable, that's where you're growing. And this again is something that to me is, is a fundamental part of photography. It is about growing. So enough of all that, let's dive into some specifics for you and I'm going to initially talk about location based challenges. Now I have spoken about these before and in fact during COVID I even put ah, a small brochure with a bunch of challenges that you could do in and around your home. because the whole Covid situation, I obviously don't know what your experience of that was, but to me having a creative outlet when you're pretty much stuck at home and you're very limited in what you can do, where you can go. Having a creative outlet I think is really important for good mental health. And if you are new to the podcast, you might not know that. That's something that I, feel quite strongly about. If you have listened to the podcast for a while, you'll perhaps know that I do talk about it from time to time. It's not something I make a big deal of. But again, having a creative activity that ideally is separate to what you would normally do for your work is a really good thing to do from a mental health perspective. So that's another argument for picking up your camera, taking on a challenge, or just going out and shooting some photographs. So the first location based challenge is what we call a neighborhood walk. And basically the idea of that walk is to tell the story of the location of where you live and limit yourself to being no further away than say one to two k's from your home. If you live in a metric country, if you are dealing with miles, then maybe limit yourself to one mile from home. And I think for most of us that is actually once you start really looking at what's around, that's quite a big area. And one aspect, one important aspect of the challenge is to really stop and look at what's there around you. And I have definitely spoken about this before on podcasts and in workshops and things. But stopping and looking at what you walk past every day is a really important step towards becoming a much better photographer. And that might sound like an odd thing to say, but at least in the area of general photography, one of the important things about photography is to see what's there. And when I teach photography, I, talk about the four steps of photography, where you get from, you know, not having no photograph to having something that people are looking at. The very first step in that is to have an idea of what you're going to shoot is to see the photograph before you shoot it. And stopping and looking and becoming a really good observer is absolutely key. And we're doing a local project is particularly helpful is that, you've got a locality wherever you live. You know, there's stuff around you that you can photograph, but this is much more about training yourself to see what's there. And then when you do go somewhere else, there's a good chance that you are, going to see things that certainly other people haven't seen and maybe that you wouldn't have seen if you hadn't done this exercise and put a bit of time into just really observing what's around you. So that's the first of the location based challenges is to do a neighborhood walk is to really look what's there. It's to tell the story of where you live. That might be it could be the architecture. If you live in an urban area, it could be the wildlife, the flora, the fauna. If you live in the country, you may have urban, live in an urban area where there's trees and maybe green, green space, all of that kind of thing. So tell that story. Now. The only thing I will say if, particularly if there's people and children about and that kind of thing, just be very conscious of the law wherever you are, if there are restrictions, which are there to protect children and just be aware of what the local laws are regarding taking photographs of people in the street. now in a lot of countries that's fine. it's kind of hands off. You know, once you're out in the open, you're out in the open. But there are definitely countries where it's not okay to just photograph people in the streets. So before you do any of that, do please check and if necessary just Google what the rules are for where you live and yeah, respect those laws. So this, this post, this podcast, I might bend rules, but I'm not about breaking laws. So just to be clear on that, the next challenge I'm going to just mention is I'll call it urban exploration. But it's the idea, it is to find a landmark or maybe something that's hidden away. So this builds on the neighborhood walk. So the neighborhood walk is pretty much looking at everything to tell the story of that, that particular neighborhood where you are. Whereas the urban exploration is to now focus in on one particular aspect of that area. So a good thing to focus in might be a building or as I say a landmark or maybe something that's hidden away that perhaps a lot of people don't even know is there. And that again can be very rewarding when you start pulling together photographs of something in the area that not many people know about. I used to like photographing details of churches and old buildings. mostly because the people who built them, particularly the older ones, they really believed in what the church represented. It was a connection with God to them. And what it meant was that the people who were doing that work were putting their whole heart and soul into it. They were doing the best work they possibly could. So I lived in. I, grew up in a town that dated back to, certainly, the 11th century. It was actually older, but, we could definitely be sure of the 11th century. So there were some pretty old buildings around. And the old churches were great for just looking at some amazing details, small carvings, small details that people had put into a much larger building. So that's true of any building you go into. If you take a look around, some architects will build in small details that most people will completely overlook. So that's definitely one thing to look at. you could also sort of expand on the landmark and building something like geometric patterns, that kind of thing. one of the things I always do when I'm looking at buildings, particularly older buildings, is to just look to see where they've been reused. And the classic example is when you realize you've spotted a lintel in the middle of a wall and there's bricks below. but it would have been at one stage a window or maybe a doorway. And with older buildings in particular, you could certainly, once you start getting to even 100 years old, it doesn't have to be that old. But buildings do change their usage over time. Ah, a lot of them. So you can start to see the history of the building. And as the usage of a building changes over time, the chances are that's happened because what's going on in that neighborhood has changed over time. So the opportunity to do more of, you know, kind of a semi historical neighborhood walk. So again, all of this is about looking at what's there and starting to interpret what you're seeing. So looking at what the stories are that are there. another thing you can do is, we'll call it a travel series, which is where you tell a story about a trip, but you limit yourself to a particular number of images. So that might be 10, you might get generous, it might be 20. it is not 200 or 500. you know, keep it as concise as possible. It's like, it's really describing a location to somebody, but keeping that description and maybe the description of your experience really tight and really focused and really to the point. So this is about how efficient can you get in telling a story using a very small number of photographs. if you grew up with film, you will probably find that a little bit easier, to be honest, because, if you use film, you'll know that you are limited to probably at most 36 images on a Roll. And changing a roll can be disruptive. So if you are using film or you want to use a simulate using film, just imagine that you only had a roll of film which might be a 12, 24 or 36 exposure roll and that's it. So you need to tell that story using that number of frames. Obviously in digital, your pretty much unlimited in most practical respects to what you can shoot and record. But again if you limit yourself to a certain number of shots and I would suggest keeping it down to 10 or 12, then it makes you really think about what you're photographing and what you want in that photograph. It makes you think about composition, it makes you think about how that particular image fits in the overall sequence that you're shooting. And starting to build that kind of thought process and that kind of discipline can be very. I believe it's a very good thing to do in developing your photography style and getting more efficient with the the photographs you shoot. Obviously if you are away and things are going on, you're going to just shoot a lot of images. I mean most of us do. But it does mean that when you come to curate them, if you put a lot of thought into how you're putting the image together, into the composition, into what the subject is, into the why you're producing that photograph when you curate them, you're likely to be curating a set of photographs that are probably very good, I would say generally as photographs but have a lot to say. Each one has a lot to deliver to whoever is looking at it. So that's the, the travel series. So that's about a limited series of images and then related to that. So the travel can be kind of anywhere and it could be multiple locations. But the challenge related to that is to do the one location and maybe just stay there all day and take photographs. So you don't necessarily have to limit yourself. But obviously you can combine these challenges to make it more interesting. You know, maybe you want to stretch yourself a little bit. So do the, the neighborhood walk but only in 10 images or the urban exploration, the landmark, the stay in one location all day. So the, the purpose of the stay in one location all day challenge is really to work with light. So the what you're aiming to learn there is a little bit different to the others. The others are more about observation. You're really looking at observation, composition and thinking about the story. And remember, you can use composition to suggest storylines as well. That's something that I talk about in the training courses. it's stuff that I cover on workshops, that sort of thing. But when you're in one location all day, it's really an exercise focused on life and understanding light and how it changes not only at different times of day, but you may well have the weather changing while you're there. So obviously that will impact, not only the camera settings you're using, but will impact the mood of the images that you're shooting. So shooting an image just after dawn, just after the sun's come up, can create a very different image to an image shot at the same location looking at the same subject, but at midday on a bright summer's day and equally at midday on a very cloudy day. So you've got, you might have a lot more. Presumably you would have a lot more highlights on a day where there's a bright sunlight, but on a cloudy day you've got a much more even light. And, if you've heard me spoke about portraits before, that's the kind of weather that I recommend for, shooting portraits outdoors. It's far, far easier to do it with an even light than it is in bright sunlight. And unfortunately, a lot of people tend to head for the bright sunlight because the subject's well lit, but they're also squinting and you've got, high dynamic range in the image. So that basically there's a big difference between the brightest and the darkest parts of the image. Whereas where you've got more even lighting, you can, you've got a lower dynamic range, but you've got a more even feel to the image. Now is that more impactful? Well, I don't know. That's really up to you as a photographer and how you use contrast and you might use post processing in this. the other thing of course, is to get familiar with the golden hour, which is that hour after sunrise and before sunset when the sun is low in the sky. So you start getting these yellows and reds, oranges, all those kind of colors coming in. And also, the blue hour, which is the hour after sunset and before sunrise. So basically the, the sun is starting to create light, but the sun is still below the horizon. So playing with that, it's a really good exercise to do even if you don't do it very often. But it will get you familiar with the kind of things you have to think about when you're working in different lighting conditions, what changes you need to make to your settings to get a particular effect. It gets you Thinking much more about how you're using light. What is the light doing for you? Is it simply illuminating the image? Is it creating mood? Are you creating mystery? How are you using the composition in that image to make the most of the light that's there? Do you have an image that is very, very dark with one or two highlights in it, which presumably one of which would be your subject? Or do you have a very bright image and you're making use of dark areas, you're making use of contrast. So this is stuff to think about. And on the one hand it's quite technical because obviously photography is about using light. So it does help if you understand light a little bit. But equally by starting to understand the techniques and the technical side of photography, it also helps you to become more creative. And this comes back to where I started, where I was talking about. Doing these exercises is really about helping you to start to shoot images that maybe before you started all of this, this work, however long it takes, they're not the kind of image, not only that you would never taken, but you wouldn't have either imagined or you couldn't have imagined yourself taking because you just lack that understanding and that's of both light. It's about observation, it's about understanding your camera and how to get the most from your gear. So that's kind of taken as full circle the way around, slightly different to some of the other podcasts I've done. So please comment, give me a like, let me know how you found it. Has this been useful? Has it got you thinking? do you want to grab your camera and go outside and start photographing things? And remember on the on the website, so www.ge.photography if you look under the, I think some of the courses or improving your photography or whatever, tab, there is a 14 day challenge and as I've said all you do is you just drop your email in and then you start getting emails. You'll get one, I think straight away, more or less. And then you get one a day for 14 days. So obviously you can pace yourself. If you can't do them every day for 14 days, it doesn't matter. You still get the emails but you don't have to action them every day. There's, you know, I'm not checking on you, but it is a good exercise to do. And if you are feeling a little bit stuck, if you're feeling that your photography is a bit jaded, you just feel you're doing the same old thing, then I really do recommend that if you do nothing else, just do a challenge and, just get yourself thinking a little bit differently about what's around you, what's in front of you, and how you can convey what is in front of you as a story, as an interesting image, perhaps with, some emotion attached to it. Okay, so that is it for, this podcast. Congratulations if you got this far. yeah. Please remember to like and subscribe. That is a big help and I will speak to you in the next podcast. So bye for now. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Now, I just want to say thank you for tuning in and joining me in the, Wildlife and Adventure Photography podcast. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please give me a. Like a subscribe, maybe tell your friends, and by all means leave a comment. And if there is a subject you would like me to cover in the future, please let me know and I'll, be very happy to do my best. So thanks again for joining, me. And I look forward to seeing you again. Next podcast. Bye for now.