How to find your style in street photography.

And I’m gonna give you a practical way to determine whether or not you have found your style.

Because after seven years shooting every day, for seven years straight, I have finally found my style. Found it about a year ago, right?

And it took me a long time. I mean, during that time, I took five, six hundred thousand photos before I finally figured it out.

And what I ultimately learned is my style is similar to other people’s styles in the past, and even contemporaries, right?

And that’s fine with me.

I just don’t really think there’s a lot of opportunity to do some new revolutionary way of actually taking the photo.

Maybe how we present the photography and all that, with AI and all that good stuff, that’s to be determined.

But all right, practical way to determine whether or not you have found your style.

And I think the easiest way to find out is if you look at your archive and it’s just way too big. Like, your archive is just full of photography.

And I used to think this was bad.

Yeah, I used to think that keeping all these photos actually meant that I’m taking easy photos or I’m just keeping photos I don’t really need to keep.

But I’ve come to a point in my photography journey that I just take so many damn photos. Like, it’s impossible to not have a lot of photos.

And the reason I take so many damn photos is because I’m locked into the style of photography that I am partaking in.

I’m completely locked in.

So, I mean, what else can I do? I’m so locked into the photography, and I still shoot every day, and I usually keep roughly around 5%.

Every time I click the shutter, there’s a 5% chance that I’m going to keep that photo, right?

So I think that’s actually pretty high.

Some days it might be 2%. You know, it just depends.

Depends on my spirit for the day, right?

But I think that’s the most practical way to determine whether or not you have locked in your style.

You just got the archive.

Like this month alone, I’m easily going to approach 1,000 keepers.

This month, I probably, what’s this? It’s October 5th, 6th, something like that.

Okay, let’s just use September for an example.

For the month of September, I’d have to go look, but I bet I have at least 1,000 keepers because I probably took like 20,000 photos that month, right?

And that’s roughly about a 5% keeper rate.

And I could probably go in there, whittle down, you know, maybe another percent, which would be fine by me.

I’d get like, what, 800 keepers?

What the hell are you going to do with 800 damn photos?

I have so many damn photos in the archives. Like, what do you do with all of them?

I don’t even think it’s anything theoretical or anything.

It’s just simple math.

Or maybe, you know, somebody’s already gotten to where I’m at, shooting all these photos every day, and now maybe you might only go out twice a week.

Whatever.

I think the 5% rule is like the tried-and-true way to determine, for me.

See, I think if you’re struggling, really realizing, like, are you taking photos that you like so much you just can’t delete them?

I think that is where you need to be, no matter how many photos.

But I would actually warn against keeping too many.

I think having the mindset of ruthlessly cutting your photos, I think that’s the mindset to have.

Like, you need to be very picky about and selective about what you want to keep.

You know, you want to be very ruthless with that process, the process of editing and culling.

And as long as you go into it with that, because when I go home and I look at all my photos, I’m just going off instinct and intuition when I look at the work.

Like, if it grabs me right away, I just keep it.

You know, I keep it for the first run.

I might keep 10% for the first run, and then I just quickly go through them all again.

You know, eliminate any closer duplicate-type-looking photos.

And then at the end of the day, I have, you know, 30 photos, and they’re all kind of unique. They’re all like a different type of photography.

So yeah.

Anyways, I’m kind of rambling a little bit, but I would just do that.

Just aim for a 5% keeper rate, ruthlessly edit, and then if you get to the point where you just got so much work, I think that’s the exact space we need to be in as street photographers.

Because we need to just be creating as much as humanly possible to continue learning about our world.