My photography style is to have no style…
Neither am I trying to win photography contests.
I simply do my best to tell the story of a place and its creatures as honestly as I can… and allow the images to speak mostly for themselves.
To that end, I have used cheap point and shoots, smart phones, and middle of the road point and shoot cameras–small and light enough to carry in my pants pocket, functional enough to give me manual control, and easy enough to operate with one hand in most situations. Like most things in life, this is a tradeoff. While I have missed some great shots because the auto focus was too slow, depth of field uncontrolled, or the light sensor not quite sensitive enough, I have gotten some great shots because I was able to unobtrusively photograph as if I was a fly on the wall.
Sidebar: I’ve had cameras bent, broken, destroyed, and stolen… and had to beg, borrow, steal, and improvise on many occasions.
It is important to me that I photograph honestly. I do not employ artificial means to get “the perfect shot”–no stakeouts, no drones, no VIP access. Every one of my photographs could have been taken by anyone with a point and shoot camera, two good feet, a smile, and sometimes a wee bit of courage. Furthermore, all my photographs are “natural”: I shoot in ambient light with no filters or clever time exposures, even if this means that the photograph is blurred or less than technically perfect.
And after I return home from my travels, I perform almost no post-processing. I will crop here and there in order to frame images appropriately or to eliminate superfluous details and I always resize the images in order to optimize them for presentation on the web. But I do have a confession to make: I am still a chronic over-exposer and sometimes need to adjust the brightness. Beyond that, I would never “photoshop” an image in order to make it “pop”. What you see in the photo is exactly what you would have seen with your own eyes if you were standing there with me.