Favourite photographers who influenced how you shoot: who are yours?

[EventHorizon]

Not necessarily famous names though those are fine too. Could be someone you found on Instagram five years ago whose composition style changed how you framed shots. Could be a parent or grandparent whose old prints you found in a box and could not stop looking at. Influence takes a lot of forms.

I am asking partly because I think we sometimes shorthand this as a list of canonical names but the actual answer for most people is more specific and more personal than that. The photographer who changed something for you might not be someone anyone else would recognise.

Personally my biggest influence was someone whose work I encountered entirely by accident and who I still cannot fully describe the appeal of. Something about the relationship between light and subject. I have been chasing that feeling in my own work ever since.

[StormForge62]

Saul Leiter for colour. Before I found his work I was shooting in a style I would now describe as technically fine and emotionally empty. His use of reflections and foreground obstruction rewired something for me.

[StoneCold]

My dad. He shot on film through the 70s and 80s and his prints are the best photographs of my childhood. The way he composed intimate moments without people noticing the camera is something I have never matched.