So, I wanted to talk about my little journey trying to figure out the style of Danny Pimsanguan. It wasn’t like a formal study or anything, just me messing around and trying to get a feel for it.
I first bumped into his work, I think it was probably online somewhere, scrolling like usual. What grabbed me wasn’t just that the pictures looked good, lots of pictures look good. It was something else, a kind of mood, you know? Hard to put your finger on it initially. Felt very real, but also kinda cinematic maybe?
Naturally, the first thing I did was grab my own camera. Thought, “Okay, I see what he’s doing, maybe try something similar.” Went out, shot some stuff. Looked at it later. Nope. Flat. Boring. Nothing like what I was seeing from him. It was actually pretty frustrating.
Getting into the Weeds
I realized just pointing the camera at similar things wasn’t cutting it. That’s obvious, right? But you gotta learn it sometimes. So, I started looking closer. Really looking.
What I started noticing:
- Lighting: He seemed to use natural light a lot, but in a very specific way. Lots of shadows, but they weren’t just dark blobs. They had shape, they added to the feeling.
- Moments: His shots often felt like you just caught a real moment happening. Not super posed or stiff. Even portraits had this candid feel.
- Editing: This was a big one. The colors weren’t hyper-realistic sometimes. They were pushed a bit, maybe desaturated sometimes, other times really warm. It wasn’t just slapping on a filter; it felt intentional.
So, I decided to focus. Forget trying to copy whole pictures. I picked one thing: light and shadow. Went out specifically looking for interesting shadows, how light fell on people, on streets. Spent ages just watching light change.
Then I messed around with editing. Didn’t even use presets. Just played with the sliders myself. Tried to get those muted tones, that slightly warm or cool feel depending on the shot. Lots of trial and error. Made tons of ugly pictures in the process, let me tell you.
Things Clicking (Sort Of)
It took a while. There wasn’t one single “aha!” moment. It was more like slowly, gradually, things started to make a bit more sense. I did this one shoot, just walking around downtown, not really looking for anything specific. But I was thinking about that light, about those in-between moments.
Got back and started editing. Instead of forcing it, I just tried to bring out the mood I remembered feeling when I took the shots. And a couple of them… they weren’t Danny Pimsanguan photos, obviously. But they had a little bit of that feeling I was chasing. They felt less like snapshots and more like… well, more like something I actually wanted to create.
So yeah, that was my process. Didn’t become him, didn’t even perfectly replicate the style. But digging into his work forced me to look at my own process differently. Learned to pay way more attention to light and the subtle moments. It wasn’t about copying, more like learning a new way to see things, and then figuring out how that fits into my own way of doing stuff. It’s an ongoing thing, really.
