I’ve been a photographer for a long, long time. Like, most of my life. I was a professional for much of that time too. I’ve photographed landscapes, food, animals and wildlife, people, weddings, children, pets, even racing greyhounds!
Over time, we all develop what is called a style. That simply means a way of doing things that is recognizable as yours. For a long time, when I was heavily involved with PPA and traveled the country speaking and teaching, my style was called…
BRIANIZED
I mean, seriously, where do you think I got that from? Yes, someone was looking at a gallery of competition images and immediately said, “I know who’s image that is, it’s Brianized.”. And from there, it caught on, and became a “thing”.
As I worked through photographing thousands of weddings and hundreds and hundreds of portraits, that style stuck with me, even if not every image or job required it.
Now that I am a RECOVERING Wedding Photographer, my subjects are more… mundane. Like random slices of life, or my cats. Or, our recent trip to Belgium and France. I wish I had more time there to really delve into photographs of the place, but… a few stolen moments was really all we had. We were there for business reasons… well, mostly.
Anyway! With these new subjects comes a whole host of challenges that I’ve never really had to worry about before. At a wedding, I could ask people to get the heck out of the shot, or with portrait sessions, the whole point was to not have some rando walking into the photo. Not so with street and documentary photos. There are tons of unwanted elements in the shot, ALL THE TIME.
Now, first, let me say, not every person, car, or sign is necessarily a distracting element, but… I am finding more and more that I LOVE seeing images that appear timeless, like it could have been created this morning, or three hundred years ago (if photographs existed then). That is so cool to me.
So, I work on images that at first glance might not be that interesting. Much of the focus so far has been photos from Europe, where I had little time to really wait for the most opportune moment, and that makes it more challenging, since it’s almost a snapshot that I have to work with, but… with some editing, those too can become magical.
Take this image for example:
I can write a list of a hundred things that are wrong with this shot. I remember taking it too. It was COLD, my hands were hurting, and we were walking to meet up with our tour guide and none of us knew exactly where to go. I had seconds to get this shot. Seems to be the story for these images.
First off, the sky is gone. Just completely overexposed. Second, that composition is horrible. The people (part of our group) are distracting, as are the cars and folded up table umbrellas and other people walking around. They put a date on the photo and I simply cannot have that! LOL.
The geometry of the building was all messed up too. A super wide 17mm lens will do that sometimes. So, I had to do a lot of corrections.
I also did something I don’t often do, I replaced the sky, with… the original sky. You see, the part on the right was blown out completely, so, I selected the original sky and stretched it to use the well exposed areas to cover the overexposed areas. Bam, instant great looking sky.
Anyway, here’s the finished image. To me it almost looks like an illustration. It certainly looks more than 4 weeks old!
