Formula v Feeling?

How do you take photos? Do you go through a set formula to get a good snap? e.g. light has to be a certain way, composition follows a standard pattern, subject matter is limited. Or do you just snap away whimsically; when something catches your eye you just take a shot and hope that it will be a good photo? Or do you do a bit of both?

In this post I want to have a look at what I call Formula v Feeling. I don’t intend to reach many definite conclusions about this and I will probably ask more questions than I answer, but I hope it will serve to make readers think about how they take photos and maybe help them improve their technique.

Formula

So what is formulaic photography? I would describe it as following a set of similar steps every time you take a photo so the results come out very similar. This can be at the time of taking the photo and/or at the post-processing stage. To give an example of my own, for a while I just took landscape shots that had to have cloudy skies. I also stuck fairly rigidly to the rule of thirds when shooting, and then post processed the cloudy sky quite heavily.

Although I liked this style at the time, I now look back and think it just looks a bit rigid and over-processed. But at the time that is nearly all the photos I produced as I thought they looked great, and I just wouldn’t entertain a scene that didn’t fit these formulaic guiedlines of mine. Here are some more examples:

So this highlights some of the good and bad points of taking a formulaic approach. It gives you an easily repeatable formula you can use to create photos of a similar style. But unfortunately if the final result isn’t that great, you will just keep putting out photos that aren’t great. But it does give you a baseline to work from and then take this formulaic style and try to adapt and enhance it to produce a better formula.

So what I have done now is list below some of the advantages and disadvantages that I see to this approach.

Advantages

• If you have a formula that produces good results, it is easy to repeat
• Taking good photos becomes more objective
• You have a baseline that you can use to adapt or tweak to develop your photos further
• You have a definite and recognisable style that permeates through your photos
• You can have a unique style that nobody else has, and you can easily repeat this through your photos
• By taking a formulaic and systematic approach to photography you perhaps a better knowledge of the intrinsic components of what makes up a good or bad photo

Disadvantages

• Your photos can look samey
• If the formulas you keep running through don’t produce good results, it can be hard to adapt
• It can make photography a bit boring as you run through the same steps over and over again
• It can take a lot of the fun out of photography
• It can make you, as a photographer, rigid and predictable, and do the same for your photos
• Makes it harder to embrace new photographic styles

Feeling

Ok. So I have had a look at a formulaic approach, now let’s have a look at a ‘feeling’ approach which is basically the diametric opposite. Thus, it’s not using any formulaic preset steps and just shooting on whimsy when you see something that catches your eye. This can be anything; any subject matter, any composition, any post-processing etc you just shoot when you see something good and process the photo with how you feel at the time. Below are some examples of shots I have taken like this. Most of these were taken earlier in my photographic journey.

So again, I will list some of the advantages and disadvantages I see from this approach.

Advantages

• You can produce a diverse range of photographs
• Don’t have to get mired with trying to shoot to a specific formula – you just shoot on whimsy
• It can make photography more fun and spontaneous
• You can find good shots from places you hadn’t thought of before

Disadvantages

• You can end up with a real hotch potch of different photos with no distinct style between them
• When you do take good photos it can be hard to quantify what makes them good, and replicate that
• You don’t have a distinctly recognisable and/or unique photographic style

A Bit of Both

Although you can see these two approaches as opposites that doesn’t mean to say you can’t do both when taking photos; and probably most people do a bit of both. It is just some people may lean more heavily to one of these aspects. Speaking from my own experience, I tended to shoot more on feeling earlier on in my photographic journey and once I found photos I liked, I tended to try and work up a more formulaic approach to replicate these good photos. Maybe that is a good approach, I’m not sure. I think for many people over time they see more and learn more and I think become more formulaic and experiment less because they are more aware, consciously and subconsciuosly, what makes a good and bad photo, or a photo analogous with their artistic preferences or not.

However, again from my experience, I found it is easy to become too rigid and formulaic in my approach and this limited my diversity and sometimes my enjoyment in photography. So I had to forcefully try to shoot more on feeling to add diversity and allow my photography to evolve.

I think I will wrap it up there. I hope this post has given you something to think about in terms of your own photography. Maybe you just shoot without a second thought, or maybe you rigidly follow a formula. If you aren’t getting the results you want maybe you need to have a look at how you shoot. If your photos look to diverse, maybe think about working out a more formulaic style, or if they look too samey, maybe think about snapping more whimsically. Either way, I hope it has provided some useful insight.

Thanks for Reading, Neil