Finding your photographic style. It’s something you read everywhere when you start to take your photography a little more seriously. But when you’re still meandering those creative waters, find the style that suits you, you’re made to feel like you can’t afford to experiment.

I’ve been asked a little bit recently about my processing style of my images on Instagram. And to be honest it was something that I really had not really sat down and thought about.

It’s only right that you seek out the advice you need when you are starting something new. I did exactly the same thing, as (at the time) I had only had a private account, and I really hadn’t given much conscious thought to what attracted me to the accounts that I followed. I googled “how to grow your Instagram account” and trawled through page after page of solid ten point advice programs. The one point on all of them was ‘find your own style’. And that posed the question, what is my style?

I remember when I first decided to start Floresca Times, I was in Ubud in Bali. If you go back to the beginning of my Instagram feed, you’ll see that I started out in black and white! The first twenty images are all monotone. I had decided that was going to be my ‘edge’ my point of difference. Amazing when you think about it, I was in the greenest and most tropical place I’d ever been to and decided that black and white would do the trick differently.

I thought that having a very strong defined aesthetic was what was going to work. Very quickly, I felt incredibly inhibited. As humans, we don’t just see things in shapes and forms, but also in colour and tone. I soon felt that I am not a black and white person, and ran back into the loving warm arms of colour.

I realised that I really didn’t have a clue about what my style was going to be. I felt like I was back at square one after my dalliance with black and white. What on earth was my style going to be?I was also trying a lot, and I mean A LOT of processing styles. I was still sorting out what fit, what felt right for me as a person.

I decided to put a defined style aside and just play. I looked at the lenses I had and realised that I was very much a large aperture kind of gal. In experimenting and improving my skills, I thought I’d perhaps tackle another point that prevalent in the advice lists of this Instagram masters: a narrative. I started to treat my Instagram feed as a reflective journal. The images I began taking were mainly botanical in nature, but they were cropped in, close and intimate. I think my images were becoming a metaphor for the change in the way I was viewing myself.

Anway, I digress greatly. S0, I was also trying a lot, and I mean A LOT of processing styles. I was still sorting out what fit, what felt right for me as a person. It wasn’t until I got to England where I actually took the processing of my images seriously. I’d been using Lightroom and Aperture on and off with a dash of Photoshop, and had decided that Lightroom setup was a good fit for me. Tick, I had another imperative off the IG masters’ lists down; editing software.

I started out using a whole lot of VSCO filters that I had got, (I can’t honestly remember if they were free or if I paid for them), and by the process of elimination started to find the combinations of ‘feels’ that made me say yes. The process of elimination is your best friend with photography. When you have so many opinions, so many differing sources of advice, everyone saying this one is great, this one is fabulous, you can only try as many as you can

As I spent more and more time in the endless ‘change room of Lightroom presets and filters, I started to realise that so many just didn’t match up with this yet undefined vision in my head. I wanted to take aspects of one and mix them with another. I watched video after video on how to use Lightroom more effectively. I think I was trying to learn as much as possible to make my images as authentic as possible, as authentic as the words that were pouring out of my into the captions.

To be honest, since I’ve been in the UK, my process has completely changed and has become far more defined. I feel like my photography has improved, through having greater knowledge of what I can achieve in Lightroom. This has helped immensely when out shooting, thinking about doing as little major work as possible to the images once they’re imported into Lightroom.

I have spent every day since I’ve been here doing something towards furthering my photography, and I still want to keep learning. It wasn’t until one a new Instagram friend pointed out to me that she really quite liked my processing that I had realised that I had indeed started to form one of my own.

I’ve followed some fabulous people as well since I’ve been here, and I think that has helped me as well. I think the greatest lesson I’ve learnt from them is that your image will not cut through if they’re isn’t it a story, that says something of how we feel, of how to see the world. At the end of the day, that is essentially what Instagram has created. A proper platform within which we show others our own perspective.

So don’t be worried about not having a distinct style as of yet. You won’t know unless you keep trying until you find something that just feels right. Don’t be afraid to try a few different things. It’s this trying of different things where we hone our skills and then our style eventually naturally evolves from finding out what fits and what doesn’t. So go experiment and most importantly have fun!