... do not adjust your monitor.

Style.  Should you chase it or just let it come to you?  I'm not talking about no-pleat, flat-front euro pants or the thankfully brief resurgence of the cardigan sweater.  What I'm asking is do you aspire to master a particular style, or does your work eventually become your style?  If it does, how does it?

If you like the way something looks, do you just tend to do more of it?  If you do so much more of it that you do less of other things, does it just "become" distinctively YOUR work?  Is it eventually a level of comfort that makes a photographer's work recognizable?  I hope not.  I hope I never chase a style... or settle for one.  If you see me getting into a technique rut... please, please stop me.  I never looked good in cardigans.

More after this jump... heheh... jump.

If you can't crack yourself up, what good is a virtually readerless blog?  :)  Back to the picture in question.  I LOVE this effect.  Before we got a new camera and I started fiddling with it rather intentionally, the ability to take this style of picture eluded me.  Now, I know how the shutter and the aperture work together to make an exposure, and how you can tweak one or the other (or both) to get what you want out of it.

I think I like it so much because it's a still picture that suggests movement.  Sometimes you just need things to live a little more than they do in the two dimensions you're given.  Here's another...

Not only do you get the point that Kelly is imaginative enough to make a fall-figure-rollerblader-outfit with leaves and safety pins... but she skates around in it.  It lets her move through the background instead of on it.  (Aside: If you know a simple way to horizontally flip pictures, I'd love to hear it.  I think I'd like this even more if she went from left to right.)

And then there's what I talked about last time (snapshot-photographs) combined with this technique.  If you can freeze a moment while it moves... that's the stuff.  That's what I want my pictures to look like... like this:

Maybe I just like pictures of my kids and people who love each other.  That's entirely possible.