There was a time when I thought personal style was something you found.
As if one day you woke up, looked at your photographs, and suddenly saw it clearly—your look, your voice, your thing. I thought style arrived like a revelation, or worse, like a decision. Pick a lane. Commit to an aesthetic. Stick with it.
The longer I’ve stayed with photography, the less I believe that.
What I’m beginning to understand instead is this: style isn’t discovered—it’s left behind.
It’s the residue of repetition. The faint trail of evidence that accumulates when you keep returning to the same questions, the same streets, the same light, the same constraints, long after novelty has worn off.
Repetition Is Where Preference Reveals Itself
One of the most consistent ideas echoed by photographers writing about style is that it emerges not through invention, but through return.
“Your style is revealed by what you choose to photograph again and again—often without realizing it.”
— Photography Life,
Visual Echoes: The Threads of Personal Style in Photography
That idea resonates deeply with my own experience. I didn’t decide to keep walking the city. Over time, walking simply became inseparable from how I see, something I’ve explored more explicitly in Why Walking the City Is Essential to My Urban Photography Practice.
I didn’t plan to return to the same focal lengths either. Yet the discipline of working consistently with a single field of view—particularly 28mm—quietly shaped my way of framing, presence, and proximity, something I’ve written about in Finding Style in the Street: The 28mm Field of View and the Discipline of Presence.
Those preferences surfaced only after repetition gave them room to show themselves.
Repetition strips away intention and exposes instinct.
Style Is a Byproduct, Not a Goal
One of the most dangerous traps in photography is chasing style directly. When style becomes the goal, the work tends to harden too early. It becomes self-conscious. Performative.
“Style isn’t something you design in advance. It emerges from doing the work long enough that patterns begin to repeat themselves without effort.”
— Medium,
Finding Your Voice: How Personal Style Emerges in Photography
This realization sits at the heart of my longer-term commitment to practice over outcome. The structure I’ve put in place—three sessions a week over 105 weeks—was never about productivity or output. It was about creating enough repetition that something honest might surface over time, as I’ve outlined in Three Sessions a Week for 105 Weeks.
This is why I’ve stopped asking, “Is this on brand?” and started asking, “Would I make this photograph again?”
That question is quieter. Slower. And far more revealing.
Boredom Is a Feature, Not a Bug
Repetition eventually leads to boredom. And boredom is where most people quit.
But boredom is also where attention sharpens.
When the excitement fades, when the easy wins disappear, when the work feels unremarkable—that’s when you’re forced to confront what actually holds your interest. Not what impresses others. Not what performs well online. But what you are willing to return to without external reward.
“Personal style grows out of sustained curiosity—especially when there’s no immediate payoff.”
— Digital Photo Mentor,
How to Discover and Develop Your Unique Photography Style
This is why I’ve come to value constraints so highly. Whether it’s limiting myself to a season, a lens, or a specific mode of seeing, constraints act as a form of protection. They prevent dilution. I’ve seen this most clearly in my abstract street work, where committing to winter as a defining boundary clarified the project rather than restricting it, something I explore in A Seasonal Constraint: Letting Winter Define My Abstract Street Work.
Repetition Builds Recognition, Not Refinement
Another misunderstanding about style is that it’s about refinement—cleaner images, sharper execution, tighter editing.
That’s part of it. But recognition matters more.
You begin to recognize yourself in the work. Certain decisions stop feeling like decisions at all. They become defaults. Habits. Reflexes.
“A consistent style develops when technical decisions stop being conscious choices and start becoming second nature.”
— Fstoppers,
Developing a Sense of Consistent Style in Your Photography
This shift—from conscious choice to instinct—is something I’ve noticed repeatedly when reviewing bodies of work over time. Individual images may succeed or fail, but patterns emerge regardless, often long before I’m aware of them in the moment.
Style Is What Remains When You Stop Trying
I don’t believe personal style can be rushed. I don’t believe it can be shortcut. And I don’t believe it arrives on schedule.
What I do believe is that if you keep showing up—walking, observing, failing, repeating—something accumulates.
- Not a look.
- Not a preset.
- Not a genre.
But a way of seeing that feels inevitable in hindsight.
Style, it turns out, isn’t something you put into the work.
It’s what’s left behind when you’ve been doing the work long enough to stop pretending.