Picking a favourite photographer is a bit like picking a favourite song on your favourite album; impossible. However, choosing a list of those who have influenced your pictures is much easier.

It tends to be the photographs that I really like, I like because I know that I could never take them. For me that is what really makes a photographer great, if their style is totally and instantly identifiable.

Now being a journalism degree student, naturally documentary photographers are those who interest me most. However there are a few exceptions, those who`s street work, use of colour or tonality and general photographic ability has drastically changed my take on photography.

Irritatingly I was going to start this with Brassai but Alfie has already done him…

So perhaps I will start with a Londoner.

Don McCullin

Don was born in London in 1935 where he lived a pretty normal life. Post WWII he fell foul to the national service generation and went to fight out in Suez during the canal crisis. While he was out there he worked as a photographers assistant (after failing the written exam to become and army photographer) and spent most of his time in the darkroom. Don`s time developing during the Suez canal crisis in the 50s is apparent later in his black and white work, where his skill with tonality, shade and contrast is made ever stronger by his darkroom technique.

It was McCullin’s time in Vietnam working for the Sunday Times that really marked his place in photographic history. His iconic shot of the shell shocked GI being perhaps one of the strongest images to ever come out of a warzone. What really draws me to McCullin’s work is his skill at telling a story; he can capture a situation in its entirety, its mood and ambience, yet still manage to get the news across.

As a photographer McCullin was prolific producing a large amount of work across various corners of the globe. Sadly his recent work tends to get overlooked as simply put, he has lost the nack…However one major part of McCullin’s photographic past was his time spent in England which is often overshadowed by his more shocking Vietnam work. This is a shame as for someone all too familiar with the grotty industrial North of England I think there are few photographers who manage to to capture its mystique (if you can call it that). McCullin has a definite style which defines all his images yet what really gets me excited about his work is that, despite this strong style being embued in every image, it never gets in the way of the ‘news’. This to me is the perfect combination of camera and documentary, showing that its more than possible to be an extremely strong journalist without ever putting pen to paper.

Ogle Winston Link

If you know who this is then you are probably wondering why I put this in. Sometimes as modern day photographers we forget just how important a in depth and flawless technical knowledge of our equipment is..With all the digital aids and computerised help our photographs receive its easy to become lazy and forget just how technical photography can be..Ogle reminds me just what you can do with a camera if you have the know-how.

Ogle was a steam train obsessed photographer who devoted hours to setting up incredibly elaborate flash set ups in order to capture the U.S. locomotive network during the 1950s. Take one look at any of his photos and it will become immediately clear just how much he knows about flash and his camera. His most famous picture Hotshot Eastbound is a clear reminder to us that the camera is almost limitless if you really know what you are doing. Ogle has managed to create a perfectly exposed almost HDR like shot using a ridiculous number of flashes across a busy drive-in.

The other reason I admire Ogle so much is that he picked a subject and stuck to it. The instant satisfaction that a digital camera can give can often lead to just simply snapping anything that “looks cool”. Websites like flickr are inundated with street photographers who just snap away their daily lives (me being one of them) with no real reason or motive. Photography can be used for a purpose, to convey a story or period of time: in Ogle’s case it was the dying age of steam in the U.S.. It is important to have a reason or motive to take photos, to always remind yourself what you are trying to do or achieve. Ogle wanted to master taking pictures of trains and he clearly did. Thus if give our photography a clear and defined reason to exist, we will develop our own definite style.

Ok so there is two for you to digest, expect the next few in the coming days. I don’t want to write a whole essay for you guys partly because its boring and also because I get enough of that at university…

Gallery of images by Don McCullin and Ogle Winston Link: all copyright rests with the photographers and/or their estates