Developing your own style and voice as an artist is one of the most important AND EXCITING journey’s in your craft. It takes time and it should not come as a surprise that your taste and style can change and develop just as much as you can!
I’ve always believed that it is important to visually communicate your choice of style on your website and blog by only posting images that reflect your voice. This attracts people to you who share that same type of vision and creates a more synergistic experience.
But what do you do if style choices still vary?
Always think WIN-WIN 🙂
Even though I prefer lifestyle images with happy people laughing and interacting, I always take traditional portraits in every session I do.
I recently shot a Senior Session for my lovely cousin. Kelsey’s style is much more fashion oriented than my usual casual lifestyle approach. It’s an exciting challenge to converge both of our styles together to create a variety of images that will please everyone.
Can you can see the style difference between the fashion images and the lifestyle ones?
Fashion:
Fashion:
Lifestyle:
Fashion
Fashion:
Lifestyle:
Lifestyle:
Fashion:
Lifestyle:
Fashion:
Fashion:
Lifestyle:
Lifestyle:
Fashion:
Lifestyle:
Lifestyle:
Fashion:
Lifestyle:
Most often it is only a small difference between mood and body language or posing. When you can distinguish between the two, it can be an easy thing to work two styles into a session with only minor tweaks.
Some of you are going to think that I just labeled “serious” pictures as fashion pictures (though I did try to throw in a few different moods for each). This is only my personal opinion and interpretation, but if you look at posing and body language, and most of all the feeling of the images, you’ll start to notice the difference.
The biggest difference for me comes in the feeling of something being staged vs. something being real and authentic.
What I labeled and interpret as fashion images were a result of my coaching and directing to create a visual look and feel. (i.e. “stand like this”, “look over here”, “look at me”, “smile”, “relax your smile” etc.)
The lifestyle labeled images were a result of my interacting with her through real conversation and questions for genuine emotion and authenticity. I can tell it’s the true personality coming through.
What are your thoughts? Did I just open a can of worms that reveals where my true loyalty lies?
Brooke Snow is a Lifestyle photographer in Cache Valley, Utah. Her favorite thing to photograph is laughter and joy. She doesn’t like to photograph anything unless she’s relaxed and in a happy mood.
Brooke teaches inspiring online photography classes that bring you confidence in your skills and creativity.
Did you like this post? Please share it!
