For most of my life with a camera, people have told me I’m a good photographer. And on some days, I might even agree with them. But when I look honestly at my own body of work—laid out across years, cities, and cameras—I see something different: inconsistency. Not effort, not curiosity, not technical skill. My inconsistency is deeper. It sits in the voice, the style, the niche—three pillars that define not only how we make photographs, but also why they look the way they do, and why these photographs matter at all.
This past August, I finally decided to stop dancing around that truth. I began a two-year journey—my own arbitrary timeline—to develop a coherent artistic identity. I’ve spent years shooting, years learning, years walking thousands of kilometres through Toronto and other cities. But until now, I’ve never truly committed to the complex interior work that every photographer eventually must face: deciding who I am as a photographer.
Step One: The Discipline of a Single Focal Length
The first significant decision came easily once I admitted what wasn’t working. I needed boundaries. I needed constraints. I needed discipline—not as a punishment, but as a creative narrowing, a deliberate reduction of noise so I could finally hear my own voice.
So in August, I committed to a single field of view: 28mm.
This wasn’t a random choice. Twenty-eight millimetres has always been the frame where I see the world most truthfully—wide enough to feel immersive, honest enough to resist the flattering distortions of compression, and direct enough to force me into the scene rather than merely observe it. It is a focal length that requires presence. It asks me to step closer. It exposes hesitation. And it demands clarity.
This was the first structural change in my two-year evolution: making my niche something real, not theoretical. Urban walking. Street-level perspective. Documentary impulses shaped by the rhythm of Toronto sidewalks. A photographer who carries the city on foot and translates it through a lens that insists on honesty.
Step Two: Giving My Black-and-White Work a Home
Today marks the second major step in the journey: adopting Monochrome L (not an affiliate link), a preset pack built to emulate the tonal behaviour of the Leica M11 Monochrom but usable across all my digital files.
It is not about shortcuts. It is about consistency.
Black-and-white photography, more than colour, exposes every weakness in style. Without the emotional distraction of colour, a photograph stands naked: its structure, its depth, its transitions, its tonal decisions—all of it is suddenly the point. And up until now, my black-and-white work reflected my broader inconsistency. Some images were contrast-heavy, others flat, others muddy. Some leaned toward a filmic softness; others were clinical and sharp. Each edit lived in its own universe.
The Monochrome L system gives me a unified tonal language—one with smoother transitions, softer highlight roll-off, richer greys, and perceptual depth that colour-sensor conversions rarely achieve on their own. It is not a crutch; it is a framework, a way of saying: this is the world of blacks and whites I inhabit. This is my atmosphere.
In the same way I restricted myself to a single focal length to clarify my voice in composition, I am now restricting my black-and-white palette to clarify my voice in tonality.
This is what style development looks like in practice. It isn’t a lightning bolt; it’s a series of quiet decisions repeated over time.
Style, Niche, Voice: The Triangle That Builds a Photographer
Across all the reading I’ve done—and all the self-critique I’ve avoided for too long—the consensus is universal:
Your niche is where you work.
Your style is how your work looks.
Your voice is why it looks that way.
Scott Choucino, who spoke about the Eiffel Tower, touched on an essential point: most photographs exist in noise. Millions of technically competent images appear every day, all perfectly exposed, perfectly sharp, perfectly forgettable. And photographers become miserable not because the world ignores their work, but because their work never belonged to them in the first place. It belonged to the algorithmic river of imitation.
I refuse to continue adding to that river.
My niche: urban walking and documentary of a city and the life within it through a 28mm field of view.
My emerging style: consistent monochrome tonality, graphic structure, street-level perspective, clarity over cleverness.
My voice: still forming, but pointing toward honesty, presence, and the lived rhythm of Toronto’s streets—a voice shaped by steps, by routine, by the discipline of returning to the same places until they reveal something new.
Where This Leads Next
This two-year journey is not about arriving at some final, crystallized version of myself. It’s about building a foundation sturdy enough for evolution. Style grows. Niche narrows. Voice deepens. But none of them grow without intention.
By committing to 28mm, I defined the physical language of my work.
By adopting the Monochrome L preset, I defined the tonal language.
And by writing this—by saying it out loud—I’m defining the philosophical language.
This is the beginning of work that will finally look like mine.
Not because it’s better.
But because it’s honest.
And honesty is the only thing that survives the noise.
