Today, many photographers feel pressured to offer their clients a wide range of looks and styles to choose from. This is a nice ideal, but it's a bit like one restaurant, serving gourmet French, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Indian, and...well, you get the idea.

You can't be the best at everything, nor should you try.

As an artist, you owe it to yourself to find out what you are good at, what your photography looks like, and then enhance it, perfect it, and own it.

Take the time to discover your style by setting aside a few consecutive days to dedicate solely to photography. Use friends and family as models or even strangers at the park, beach, or hiking trail.

Just go.

Let your energy guide you and don't overthink the process. After a few days, review what you've created. Look for underlying elements that are consistent throughout the images. Select features that you like and others that you want to improve or do differently altogether. This process will gradually help you find your style.

Once you are confident in your own style, don't neglect it.

Dedicate a weekend each year to rediscovering and evolving your photography aesthetic. I like to pick a random new destination across the globe and spend seventy-two hours simply shooting. I try out new lenses and techniques, just playing around and having fun with the process. Each trip has been an adventure that yielded lots of hidden treasures and helped expand my creativity. Get creative and think of sites you could visit that interest you. The goal is to find places where you can click away to your heart's content.

Just because you are a working photographer doesn't mean you can't still have fun with a casual shoot.

My staff members still tease me about the evening they found me lying on the curb outside the studio, photographing flowers that I was holding between my toes as I held them up to capture the light from the sunset. It was silly, but the final image was a personal favorite.