How I stopped taking random photos and found my visual identity

While film recipes got me started, selling everything helped me find my eye.

🧶 Before starting this post’s actual content, let me show you what was the driver for writing it…

The driver

Yesterday, while browsing my Substack timeline, I found a note from Andreas Usenbenz talking about how he uses his Ricoh GR IV for snapshotting daily scenes.

Aside from the great snapshots he posted, what caught my attention is that he mentioned that his Leica M is still his love, and he eventually shoots with it when he is looking for more intentional shooting. I identified myself with that statement.

Then, I commented this out:

And that’s where Andreas came up with something interesting…

This, furtherly, made me reflect around my visual identity, and ultimately, write up this post, which talks about about visual identity, film recipes, how the usage of film entangles with all that, and how did I develop my own photographic language.

Coincidentally (or not…), I kinda followed the very same route, so nowadays I also don’t own anything Fuji related (except for the GFX to scan the negatives and professional digital medium-format work here and there).

My photographic life

I photograph for 25 years now. So I won’t summarize all these time in here, but just the last 10 years. A decade ago, I bought Fuji X-Pro3, and as the internet rat I am, I quickly got entangled with the film recipes from Fuji X Weekly. I installed a couple of them in my X-Pro3 and started shooting JPG only. Along with my words, I’ll post some images for you to see what I did with it.

Someone told me that color cut-outs are interesting. I started doing it then. Now, I have in my catalog a bunch of photos like that, and I don’t know what to do with them…

I, then, got seduced by the looks and LUTs and left aside my cultural/artistic/identity part…

That’s the SARS-CoV-2 (a.k.a. Corona Virus). I shot this when vaccines were discovered, back in the pandemic. I tried selling this image to image stock websites like Shutterstock without success. I shot this using the FUJINON 110mm f/2.8 Macro lens. I studied Macro, and I discovered that If I put an iPad with an image behind, the drop becomes a convex lens, and I used liquid glycerine for the droplet, it’s less viscous than water and holds better. I have a couple of other shots like that, but that’s it.

Although that proves versatility, and proves that I am a powerful photographer able to execute anything I would imagine, it also proves that I had no identity, otherwise, where is my book with tens of Macro pictures? Do I have one? No.

Can you see the drama? I’m like an intentionless powerhouse (which is worse than being incompetent).

Going through my Lightroom Library exploring shots from 2019 to 2024 is a roller coaster!

I had a X-T5, a X-Pro3, a x100v, and 7 lenses for the X system, including the beefy 100-400mm. If I need to summarize my Fuji life, I can say that I went after the affordable rangefinder experience, but ended up with too much heads-up display stuff, and an annoying auto-focus by wire that introduces latency and makes street photography more difficult.

Then, in a trip to Portugal, I photographed this old lady in her grocery store. Again, this has absolutely no relation with cityscapes over color cut-outs… Here, you already see the problem: lack of consistency.

The result of this? My work fron 2019 to 2024 was experimental, with each album looking like it was taken by a different photographer. Full of good-looking pictures alone, that don’t connect with each other.

Then I started over-editing my shit. That moon wasn’t there. I added in post. Good looking image? Yes. But, it certainly doesn’t consistently communicate with color cut-outs, macro, old people on grocery stores, or anything you’ve seen yet. Where’s the book containing all these pictures? I don’t have one.

That’s when I sold every single piece of equipment I had.

It was time for a reset

In 2024, I dove deep into the Leica ecosystem, bought a Leica Q2, then later a Voitgländer Bessa R2A, a bunch of M lenses, Leica film bodies, the M10-R. I learned development and scanning. In 1 year, I mastered the 35mm film thing.

Nowadays, I’m fine when handling film, and when I’m shooting digital, I am back into the roots of mixing film simulation, but this time, on the computer using software to simulate presets based on films I already know.

I also developed a software to add film information on the photos. It uses the predominant color of the shot, followed by film stock, camera, and other cool information. I called it ShotOn, and I’ve been consistently using it online for 1 year now.

Let’s take a look at the difference…

Rather than randomly photographing macros, cityscapes, color cut-outs, and whatever random shit that gets in front of me, this journey helped me to go out and photograph with INTENT.

Take a careful look at the following photos, taken across multiple days with different cameras and films, they all document how living in Manhattan is expensive and brutal. It’s now part of a project I’m doing called “Excuse-me, Do You Have a Reservation?” — which is probably the most spoken phrase in Manhattan to politely deny something to someone. Having all those in film unify the look because of the grain and film stuff, so once the hardware talks the same language, it gets easier for the mind to do the same.

Plus $9 for congestion pricing.

This is the price of parking a car in Manhattan.

A tourist very ready to be scammed by one of these guys in the city.

That’s photographing with intent. I am documenting Manhattan’s hustle life. That can easily turn into an interesting book that conveys something solid, a society critique, to say the least.

That’s how big photography books in history had been formed, like The Americans (Robert Frank, 1958/1959), On Photography (Susan Sontag, 1977), The Photographer’s Eye (John Szarkowski, 1966), The Pencil of Nature (William Henry Fox Talbot, 1844–1846), and many others.

I think that Leica being pricey helped me with this unitary way of thinking. One camera, fixed lens. Keep things simple. Go back to basics. Helped me reset things out.

Did it need to be Leica? No, though, the lack of distractions, and focus on the culture and language, helped me realize what was missing…

Did I need to pass through this to develop this mindset? Yes, I think so. I say the journey wasn’t useless because it gave me the technique to not miss shots like these.

Leica naturally aligns with street-photography. Rangefinder cameras align with slow shooting. Manual focus lenses align with zone-focusing.

Less variables, more space to critique your own thing.

Where did I land?

Now, I am either shooting film, or DNGs on the M10-R and applying software film simulations to mimic the films I usually shoot with film, or shooting film at all. More flexibility, less experimentation, more defined language.

These are some painted billboards I am collecting every time I visit Manhattan, as part of a new project called “Old Manhattan”, with photographs of endangered billboards on walls amidst the skyscrapers. I think that gives you a better idea of what I mean when I say that I am now photographing with intent. Again, this will all go to a book once I collect enough photographs.

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Pharmacy Prescriptions.

Less is more

My visual identity now tends to be more intentionally locked, and that helps at shooting time because I now see scenes that would work or not with my vision.

Being more deliberate helps my visual identity being more consistent, I know how to better control variables, composition, or even know if I should go out or not.

It’s like the Light and I developed an intimate relationship.

This is more deliberate than experimenting with a myriad of film recipes from an unknown website rendering in unexpected results.

Why is this important?

If you want to do anything a little bit more serious with photography, you need that consistency across your work. It’s like describing the difference between a photography book someone would be interested in buying, versus your latest vacation album.

It doesn’t matter if it’s black and white, or pastel tones, or topic-related, like only shooting trash cans at a specific angle. It should be about being deliberate without being mono-thematic.

This is also part of another project of mine, called “1 sec before it closes", where I am documenting what people are doing in Manhattan 1 second before pedestrian signals close. I am documenting these over years, and over the 4 seasons. This one was during the summer.

When we talk about the way a photograph looks, a film stock helps with achieving that look because it’s embedded in the film, and there aren’t a myriad of film stocks around. Again, limitation enhances creativity.

Today, I can say that I have my roots based on film photography, and when I shoot digital, I have a trustable reference.

It’s all about references

To me, digital photography is supposed to be edited. I don’t think sensors do a good job of delivering out images that are ready to be published (or shared). It lacks in texture, in personality. Digital sensors are a tool that capture information with minimum loss, for you to add your personal touch.

Getting in touch with film helped me developing my eye towards that personal touch. In today’s world of AI, software allucination, and randomness, this consistency is the most important thing a visual artist must have.

Film gave me these references.

Every photographer does good and bad photos. What you perceive as a good photographer, is a photographer that only shares work that consistently strikes the same look or purpose. Henri Cartier-Bresson had bad photos. Sebastião Salgado had bad photos. Evandro Teixeira, Daido Moriyama, Ansel Adams (well, perhaps this one didn’t, LOL), Annie Leibowitz, Steve McCurry, Andreas Gursky — I guarantee all of these photographers make bad photos as well.

Their knowledge relies on two things: curation and intent.

They start with photographing with intent — that filters out lots of nonsense, noise, and provide consistency across the subjects I photograph.

Then, they curate, curate, curate, curate. They have teams of people looking, debating, filtering, culling, name it. When they come up with a book, you have a selection of photos that they know it will be impactful.

The more culture you consume, the more references you have. The more references you have, the more consistent you can be.

Film definitely helps with that.