Spend even a short amount of time in any online photography forum and you’ll be inundated with conversations about the latest in camera gear and technology, opinions on lenses to buy or avoid, and all sorts of thoughts around which brand of camera is best. While those things are certainly relevant to the photography community at large, those conversations revolve around the tools used to make the image. But you know what we, as photographers, don’t really talk about enough? Our style.

There are certain photographs that we instantly identify as belonging to a specific photographer, even if we have never seen those individual photographs before. Everything about the images tells us who made that photo. We recognize these photographers because the elements of the photograph come together in a way that is unique to them. It’s the way they meld together the subject, the composition, the technical execution in creating the photo, and how the photo is presented. They have a style.

Style is our visual voice; it’s an approach to photography that is exclusively our own. We all create and approach photography in different ways, and we all have different reasons for making the images we make. Style is the reason that two photographers can be mere inches apart while photographing the same scene or subject and come back with completely different images. A quick look through the photos from our workshops and shared by the BCJ Tribe shows this in action.

For some photographers, the concept of style is one of the most important parts of their photography. For others, it is the last thing they care about when it comes to their images. Style is fluid. As we evolve as photographers, our style evolves, too. Compare and contrast your own photography over the years, and you’ll see just how much you’ve grown and evolved.

Nearly every time I’ve done image reviews and asked other nature and wildlife photographers to describe their style, they lead off with something technical. Their sense of photographic style is more about the “what” than the “why,” and often begins with how they post-process their images. For example, they lean into their preference for a clean edit, their use of HDR, or a preset they’ve created to overlay all of their images. Sometimes they’ll say they have a “light and airy” or a “moody” style. Even photographers who are heavy into composites or illustrated art with their work tend to focus on the technique and how an image was made, rather than what drives them to make those images to begin with.

Approaching visual voice this way, at the surface level, holds back many otherwise talented photographers. It requires photographers to constantly change their technical style to keep up with whatever photography trend is popular at the time. The challenge with finding your style by leaning heavily into technical elements is that you are relying on that surface-level concept to make your photography engaging. Over time, relying on whatever is popular means you end up with a collection of images that looks outdated and the only thread of connection you have with your past and present work is that you followed the trends of the times.

This doesn’t mean the photos aren’t beautiful or any less worthy of attention and praise. Not every photograph needs to have a story or a motivation; images can simply exist for the pleasure of making them or viewing them. But they can often lack the depth needed to communicate things people are willing and able to engage with more than just a cursory “like” or a “love” on social media.

On the other end of the style spectrum, you have the concept that style is all you—it is your personal approach to photography. It is how you communicate your point of view and express yourself as a photographer, and each frame you make is somehow connected to your internal motivation as an image maker. While your style will continue evolving as you grow as a photographer, people still connect with your work from the past because it is as engaging and expressive as you intended at the time. They don’t rely on a trend to feel relevant; the photograph stands on its own as relevant.

Think of the iconic image, “Catch of the Day” made by Tom Mangelson in 1988. That single image of brown bears standing at Brooks Falls catching leaping salmon with their mouths not only wowed the world when it was made, it has inspired tens of thousands of photographers to visit Brooks Falls in search of recreating their own version of that image. Even more than that, Mangelson’s photo was a catalyst for understanding the magnificence of the coastal brown bear - to the point that pop culture celebrates these bears every year for Fat Bear Week.

This kind of substantive style develops over time. It comes from making mistakes, it comes from lucky captures, and it comes from experience. It comes from experimenting with your photography and exploring new ways to approach old things. It stems from curiosity and simply daring to ask, “What if I…?"

The beautiful thing about identifying your style and homing-in on the elements of photography that matter most to you, is that it shifts your brain from focusing purely on the technical execution of making an image, to creating a stronger, more engaging photograph. Instead of losing ourselves in creating photos that simply serve to document what saw or experienced, our style allows us to bring other people with us to that same experience after-the-fact.

Style goes beyond communicating about you as a photographer, as well. Everything we pull together in our photographs—composition, light, impact, mood—serve as the nouns, verbs, and adjectives about our subjects, too. Weaving together those elements with intention is what moves a photo beyond a merely evidential snapshot.

One of my favorite subjects to photograph is the coastal brown bear in Alaska, where I live. Having spent hundreds of hours with these bears, I’ve witnessed first-hand the complexity of their lives, their personalities, how they parent, their strength and power, and their gentle and curious nature. I’ve learned how to read their body language and anticipate what each bear will do next. As my observations of these bears and their lives has grown deeper, my photography of them has grown deeper, too.

A photograph like the one above exudes power, speed, and the ferocity that those who have never seen a brown bear in person before expect of a brown bear. I can’t tell you how many times people who have seen this image have asked me if I was scared or told me to be careful. For them, it elicited a fear response, but in reality this sow was simply lunging for salmon to feed her three cubs. Having my lens just above the water and the bear higher than my camera creates a heightened sense of power.

Yet a photo like the ones below, where a sow calmly nurses her cubs with a relaxed face shows a side of brown bears that is tender and nurturing.

While human mothers may not entirely understand the lives of bears, they can identify with this universal experience of being a mother and caring for their young. Further, we all had mothers ourselves, so we connect with the feeling of being cared for by a parent, even if subconsciously.

The popularity of the Bald eagle makes it a frequent subject in wildlife photography. Eagles are all over the United States, so a photo of a bald eagle against a blue sky isn’t really sharing anything with us about that bird. Was that photographed in Maine? Minnesota? Florida? This bald eagle could live anywhere when photographed against a generic blue sky. It’s simply the two things: eagle and sky.

Put that bald eagle against a background of snow-capped and cool-toned mountains, however, and now you have a bit more of a story. It gives the viewer a sense of place. They now see that this eagle clearly does not live in Florida or along the banks of the Mississippi. It speaks volumes about the world this eagle lives within—cold, rugged, and untamed.

Photos of an eagle soaring across the landscape during a sunset evoke feelings of serenity and majesty, while images that highlight their aerial acrobatics or display their incomparable skills as a focused predator communicate power and unrelenting strength.

In our language, what we say and how we say it gives us context for understanding. The tone of someone’s delivery tells us if they are being genuine or sarcastic, for example. Photographs are no different. Every frame we make communicates something about who we are as a photographer while also conveying how we see our subject. It’s in the space where the two concepts meet that we find our style.

So how does one even begin to figure out what sets their work apart from everyone else with enough money to buy a camera and enough time to master the basics? Unlike learning exposure, which comes with hard and fast rules that have stood the test of time, finding your visual voice has no rules. It can only be discovered by you, and only you can determine what it wants to say.

Rather than focusing on the purely conceptual aspects of your photographic art, it starts with a review of our own work. Looking over your photographs with a critical eye is not a skill that comes easily. Begin with looking for trends in your photography—what subjects are you drawn to? Do you photograph them in a similar way despite being in different locations? If you take photography out of the equation, are you still drawn to those same subjects? What kind of compositions do you find you like more than others in your own photography? Do you find your photos gravitate more toward portraits or are they more environmental?

In doing this exercise for myself, I realized that my photography is influenced by minimalism and the Japanese concept of wabi sabi: I find myself drawn to the beauty of things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

A photojournalist by trade, I am never allowed to edit my assignment photos beyond simple color correction and exposure adjustment, and I can never, ever manipulate an image (remove sticks, objects, etc) in Photoshop. As such, my photographic style as an artist, and not a photojournalist, leans into that experience and I find myself drawn to editorial and documentary work more than fine art. I strive to get everything right in camera and not rely on post-processing for anything more than polishing off my image. From an artful perspective, I love exhibiting a lot of negative space and I look for ways to share my naturalist side by incorporating a subject’s biology and ecology into my frames.

These are the kind of observations about your work that go into defining your style. Once you have insight into what your own collection of photographs say about you and your subjects, look at the photographs of others who inspire you. Are there themes to their work? What about their images makes an impact for you? How do they use light or composition to convey an emotion or feeling? Do you see an evolution of their own style over the years that they’ve been making photographs?


At first, discovering your visual voice will be much like learning the alphabet when you’re beginning to read. It might be simplistic for the moment, but it will quickly ramp up into a much more sophisticated language. It’s a continual, rewarding, and evolving process that will help you create the kind of photography that excites you and keeps you curious for years to come.