A common exercise that photography schools use to teach students to "see" is to photograph shapes that form letters. For example the bough of a tree might look like the letter "Y". The idea is to collect the entire alphabet.
It helps people separate the visual form of something from its literal interpretation as an object. Good photographs are often not just a documentation of an object, but a nice visual composition that is also compelling when viewed upside-down or on its side. Being able to set aside the label of an object and focus on the visual elements helps create these compositions.
When I started learning photography a few years ago, I was highly impressed by landscape photography: seeing beautiful images of seas and mountains.
Eventually I realised as someone livin' in a city, those are not parts of my city. Well, there's a beach in Jakarta but the view isn't particularly exciting. And of course it takes some time to reach the place, due to traffic jams.
And lockdown/social distancing in 2020 changed my perception about photography. From landscape/street photography to something I can photograph within 20 meters. For me, that means capturing abstract patterns like stones, leaves, peeling paint on the wall, etc. There's always something interesting as long as you are willing to "see"
As someone who's living in a small "empty" village in germany I always find it fascinating to see pictures of crowded places like Jakarta. Sooo many people everywhere. :)
I think those pictures only tell you half of truth.
The crowds are usually concentrated on certain areas like business districts, shopping malls, traditional markets, or at certain hours like streets at after office hours.
If you want to see "less-crowded" Jakarta, book a ticket say 2 or 3 days before Eid al-Fitr. Quite a lot Jakartans "mudik" (visit their hometowns to spend the holiday there).
“How to find photo opportunities?” is not an inherently bad question, but in my opinion the right answer shouldn’t be “well, you can take photos of X, Y and Z”. The right answer should be a counter-question: “well, why don’t you see opportunities for photography around you, including in your home?”.
The answer should have more to do with learning to see beauty/stories in the mundane, learning to capture/communicate them to others by way of photography (e.g., learning to work with existing light and recognizing the effects time of day or year, weather or air pollution have on it), and having the right equipment in the right situation (because even if you see a scene and know how to communicate it, it’s still pointless if you shoot a 1+ kg bulky setup that you can’t easily carry everywhere without thinking, or have to swap lenses while the moment goes away, or you envision a long exposure shot but it’s too bright and you forgot your ND filters).
Without changing my location, one week I see a lot of things I want to photograph, another week barely any. It’s not easy to intentionally get into the former state unless I go somewhere new (yes, at first I was fascinated by Hong Kong’s neon advertisement too) or get new gear to play with, and it’s not always good to be in it because many of the resulting photos are low value junk. It’s easy to accidentally slip into the latter state by neglecting mental health (being preoccupied, burning out, or just in bad shape), and it’s always not good to be in it.
Looking at the photos taken by the author, I feel “seen” so to speak because I do a lot of the same—and I am trying to stop, because I think it’s a dead end when the photo doesn’t tell a story, especially now that a realistic photo of X, Y or Z can be generated on demand for a few cents they have little value.
Being the second article on the topic, this blog post is about the author sharing some of his collections. Definitely not (just) supposed to be "you should take photos of x, y, and z" haha
I personally prefer to take pictures of people, preferably people that I know. I almost never revisit photos I take of random things like landscapes or buildings. In the hands of a more skilled photographer those pictures might be valuable, but for me taking pictures of random things seems like a waste. Especially since I primarily shoot film, and every single picture I take costs money.
In twenty years which picture am I going to want to look at? A picture of a family member or a picture of a gas station?
I think the key is "be intentional". So if you take photos of old gas stations or buildings or whatever, the reason is because... say.. you are working on a documentary project. Or a photo book/essay.
BTW, I still also shoot with 120 film and had certain themes to work on (like "color", "flower", "morning activities", etc). If I want to take (lots of) random images, my phone or DSLR is always ready.
I understand your point, though. Probably lots of us urban photographers have more gas stations photos on their drives compared to their relatives :D
I agree with you, but I would add stuff serving as a reminder. It may be also something you or people you know made. As for reminders think about a story from your life you like to tell people. I have a few photos like that, for example a parrot I have found one day. Landscapes can also work for this. I have a photo in Belvedere in Potsdam, it was a beautiful sunny day and the photo was nice even if made with 1st gen Moto G, I'm always reminded of that day just looking at that photo. Or a photo of a view from window in Supetar, Croatia.
I also prefer pictures of people, but I would generalize it to pictures that help form a memory, most are connected to people.
I find it much harder to do any type of photography in the USA where it's hard to find places to walk around. And if you do find a place to walk you'll end up in strip mall, a parking lot, a multistate chain.
Just take photos of strip malls, parking lots, and multistate chains then. They'll look great in 40 years, like William Eggleston or Stephen Shore's work does today
I can certainly understand the sentiment - most parts of most towns are like this.
But if you look, virtually every town of reasonable age has a walkable "downtown" area. Even in small Kansas towns - look at downtown Ottawa, Seneca, Lawrence, etc. Or, across the country - Rock Hill, Greenville, Savannah, Tampa, Orlando, San Diego... The only ones that lack walkable downtown areas are the most recently constructed communities (Nocatee, Florida comes to mind - recent construction, the "town center" is effectively a strip mall).
One thing that makes photography collections extremely flat is a lack of people.
A lot of programmers like photography and a lot of their albums, I'm sorry to say, just aren't good and a huge part of it is because these albums lack people portraits or photos that tell a story.
Finding inanimate objects for photography is honestly trivial which is largely what this blog is talking about.
There's three types of photos with people. Taking a photo that happens to have people in it (unsuspecting bystanders), taking a photo of an unsuspecting person where he/she is the main subject of the photo and taking a photo of a person you asked if you can take a photo of him/her.
The first style of photography is one photographers mistakenly avoid. They want some pristine capture of some landscape or object without people, but they don't realize that often people enhance the photo via the illustration of a story or providing a sense of scale.
The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care.
The end result is a collection of photos illustrating an apocalyptic earth where all humans have suddenly vanished. The blog post is in fact unknowingly promoting this style of photography.
Photography is an art. And as with art, there is no "good" or "bad" art, only something that meets personal taste or not. Dismissing one form of art because of personal taste, is, well, weird.
Edit: Anselm Adams was a landscape photographer, a really good one. I think his work and portfolio is impressive without people in it. On the other hand, Henri Cartier-Bresson created an equally impressive catalogue of work with basically no landscapes in it. That alone proofs that both photographic styles are equally valid. As is architecture photography, and fankly, any other style.
How is having personal taste weird? It's not weird at all given all people have personal taste and all people dismiss things or promote things based off of their own preferences.
Additionally there is also the shared reality of human tastes and preferences. There is certainly art that a majority of humans find good and the majority of humans find bad. It makes sense to speak to this majority preference.
Another factor: when there are people in pictures, they're often looking at phones.
My Dad ( https://petermcgrath.me/#/people ) is a great enthusiast of "street photography." He doesn't sell his work, but it's more than a hobby for him--Garry Winograd was one of his graduate school instructors and he's been shooting actively since the late 1960s.
He says his big challenge in the last decade has been finding interesting shots of people when most in a crowd are looking down.
As someone who loves doing street photography, I agree with all of this. It's not impossible to tell a story without people, but it's a whole lot harder.
> The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care.
Most people won't notice or care either. In the thousands of street photos I've taken, I've had exactly one person give me trouble (it was a stupid situation to give me trouble too, it was literally crowd of people and he wasn't even in the center of frame) and maybe a few people notice and gesture a negative (which I respected). I've asked people to take their pictures, but as soon as you do it sorta ruins it IMO, but I'm also not particularly interested in portraiture.
Please tell me you are only talking about urban photography. Because there is more life in this world than just people, and if you honestly feel that nature photography without humans is apocalyptic, that is a really bleak outlook on the vast diversity of life and beauty in our world.
Would be really nice to have a downvote button for this one. The above is riddled with broad brush bigotry and chauvinism. This belief is hilarious in 2023, well during the selfie-camera epoch. People are definitely not going away from photography anytime soon. What a hostile overreaction.
There is a downvote button once you pass a certain number of karma points you can take your reactionary opinion and downvote people without consideration to nuance. I prefer a comment like this so I can explain myself.
I'm not referring to smart phone photos and Instagram feeds. This post more pertains to "professional" photography albums on people's blogs where the photo was taken by a mirrorless or DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses. A lot of software engineers have this "photography" hobby but the thing is their photography always has a particular style of being devoid of people.
Check it out, every once in a while you may encounter such a profile or blog of an engineer. Just look at his photography albums on his personal website. No people, usually.
> It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care.
I agree with just going for it when it comes to asking strangers for their portrait. If you’re friendly and confident (and know how to take rejection swiftly and just move on), you’ll have a 90%+ success rate. Having a weird old film camera bumps that up even more, in my experience. So does opening with a compliment (“oh wow I love your outfit”).
However, taking a portrait of someone without their consent in 2023 is just a dick move. This debate has been had so many times under so many angles that you just can’t claim ignorance anymore if you take yourself seriously as a photographer.
A great book I enjoyed recently is Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities.
Depending on where you are in the world and whether you obviously fit in within the cultural fabric or not, people might get very offended/aggressive about it (you deserved it), or not say anything but that doesn’t make you any less of a dick.
Just ask. It can be as simple as pointing to your camera and showing a thumbs up with a quizzical look waiting for a nod in busy situations, it’ll take a second. If the person is performing/selling/etc, buying something/leaving a tip beforehand will help a lot.
If asking scares you so much, that picture isn’t yours to take.
Whats' with the negativity? Its an individual (leisure) pursuit and you are not influenced in any way shape or form by what other people like to photograph.
If this kind of pseudo art photography isn’t already dead, AI models will finish it off shortly. There is no juice left in photography that is concerned with gear, geometric coincidence and photoshop.
It's dead already in the sense that you won't see this stuff published on the news or anything.
As a hobby though I don't think it will ever die. You'll see a lot of this stuff on personal blogs or websites. A lot of software engineers include a photography section on their site.
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It helps people separate the visual form of something from its literal interpretation as an object. Good photographs are often not just a documentation of an object, but a nice visual composition that is also compelling when viewed upside-down or on its side. Being able to set aside the label of an object and focus on the visual elements helps create these compositions.
Eventually I realised as someone livin' in a city, those are not parts of my city. Well, there's a beach in Jakarta but the view isn't particularly exciting. And of course it takes some time to reach the place, due to traffic jams.
And lockdown/social distancing in 2020 changed my perception about photography. From landscape/street photography to something I can photograph within 20 meters. For me, that means capturing abstract patterns like stones, leaves, peeling paint on the wall, etc. There's always something interesting as long as you are willing to "see"
If you want to see "less-crowded" Jakarta, book a ticket say 2 or 3 days before Eid al-Fitr. Quite a lot Jakartans "mudik" (visit their hometowns to spend the holiday there).
are the places beautiful, or the photos of them
The answer should have more to do with learning to see beauty/stories in the mundane, learning to capture/communicate them to others by way of photography (e.g., learning to work with existing light and recognizing the effects time of day or year, weather or air pollution have on it), and having the right equipment in the right situation (because even if you see a scene and know how to communicate it, it’s still pointless if you shoot a 1+ kg bulky setup that you can’t easily carry everywhere without thinking, or have to swap lenses while the moment goes away, or you envision a long exposure shot but it’s too bright and you forgot your ND filters).
Without changing my location, one week I see a lot of things I want to photograph, another week barely any. It’s not easy to intentionally get into the former state unless I go somewhere new (yes, at first I was fascinated by Hong Kong’s neon advertisement too) or get new gear to play with, and it’s not always good to be in it because many of the resulting photos are low value junk. It’s easy to accidentally slip into the latter state by neglecting mental health (being preoccupied, burning out, or just in bad shape), and it’s always not good to be in it.
Looking at the photos taken by the author, I feel “seen” so to speak because I do a lot of the same—and I am trying to stop, because I think it’s a dead end when the photo doesn’t tell a story, especially now that a realistic photo of X, Y or Z can be generated on demand for a few cents they have little value.
In twenty years which picture am I going to want to look at? A picture of a family member or a picture of a gas station?
BTW, I still also shoot with 120 film and had certain themes to work on (like "color", "flower", "morning activities", etc). If I want to take (lots of) random images, my phone or DSLR is always ready.
I understand your point, though. Probably lots of us urban photographers have more gas stations photos on their drives compared to their relatives :D
I also prefer pictures of people, but I would generalize it to pictures that help form a memory, most are connected to people.
A photo should tell a story. In twenty years you want the memory of the story not some posed artificial set up.
Like with all stories, the setting is important so you should not discount the gas station.
But if you look, virtually every town of reasonable age has a walkable "downtown" area. Even in small Kansas towns - look at downtown Ottawa, Seneca, Lawrence, etc. Or, across the country - Rock Hill, Greenville, Savannah, Tampa, Orlando, San Diego... The only ones that lack walkable downtown areas are the most recently constructed communities (Nocatee, Florida comes to mind - recent construction, the "town center" is effectively a strip mall).
A lot of programmers like photography and a lot of their albums, I'm sorry to say, just aren't good and a huge part of it is because these albums lack people portraits or photos that tell a story.
Finding inanimate objects for photography is honestly trivial which is largely what this blog is talking about.
There's three types of photos with people. Taking a photo that happens to have people in it (unsuspecting bystanders), taking a photo of an unsuspecting person where he/she is the main subject of the photo and taking a photo of a person you asked if you can take a photo of him/her.
The first style of photography is one photographers mistakenly avoid. They want some pristine capture of some landscape or object without people, but they don't realize that often people enhance the photo via the illustration of a story or providing a sense of scale.
The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care.
The end result is a collection of photos illustrating an apocalyptic earth where all humans have suddenly vanished. The blog post is in fact unknowingly promoting this style of photography.
Edit: Anselm Adams was a landscape photographer, a really good one. I think his work and portfolio is impressive without people in it. On the other hand, Henri Cartier-Bresson created an equally impressive catalogue of work with basically no landscapes in it. That alone proofs that both photographic styles are equally valid. As is architecture photography, and fankly, any other style.
Additionally there is also the shared reality of human tastes and preferences. There is certainly art that a majority of humans find good and the majority of humans find bad. It makes sense to speak to this majority preference.
Another factor: when there are people in pictures, they're often looking at phones.
My Dad ( https://petermcgrath.me/#/people ) is a great enthusiast of "street photography." He doesn't sell his work, but it's more than a hobby for him--Garry Winograd was one of his graduate school instructors and he's been shooting actively since the late 1960s.
He says his big challenge in the last decade has been finding interesting shots of people when most in a crowd are looking down.
> The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care.
Most people won't notice or care either. In the thousands of street photos I've taken, I've had exactly one person give me trouble (it was a stupid situation to give me trouble too, it was literally crowd of people and he wasn't even in the center of frame) and maybe a few people notice and gesture a negative (which I respected). I've asked people to take their pictures, but as soon as you do it sorta ruins it IMO, but I'm also not particularly interested in portraiture.
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Even for nature photography people can be a part of it.
For nature though I typically expect a lot of animals not just landscapes, textures and macro shots of plants all the time.
I'm not referring to smart phone photos and Instagram feeds. This post more pertains to "professional" photography albums on people's blogs where the photo was taken by a mirrorless or DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses. A lot of software engineers have this "photography" hobby but the thing is their photography always has a particular style of being devoid of people.
Check it out, every once in a while you may encounter such a profile or blog of an engineer. Just look at his photography albums on his personal website. No people, usually.
I agree with just going for it when it comes to asking strangers for their portrait. If you’re friendly and confident (and know how to take rejection swiftly and just move on), you’ll have a 90%+ success rate. Having a weird old film camera bumps that up even more, in my experience. So does opening with a compliment (“oh wow I love your outfit”).
However, taking a portrait of someone without their consent in 2023 is just a dick move. This debate has been had so many times under so many angles that you just can’t claim ignorance anymore if you take yourself seriously as a photographer.
A great book I enjoyed recently is Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities.
Depending on where you are in the world and whether you obviously fit in within the cultural fabric or not, people might get very offended/aggressive about it (you deserved it), or not say anything but that doesn’t make you any less of a dick.
Just ask. It can be as simple as pointing to your camera and showing a thumbs up with a quizzical look waiting for a nod in busy situations, it’ll take a second. If the person is performing/selling/etc, buying something/leaving a tip beforehand will help a lot.
If asking scares you so much, that picture isn’t yours to take.
Asking for a photo produces something different then just taking it.
Personally the whole dick move thing I don't care about. It's such a minor thing.
It's true though that you don't want to start a fight, so use judgement on that but in terms of being a dick it's actually not a big deal.
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As a hobby though I don't think it will ever die. You'll see a lot of this stuff on personal blogs or websites. A lot of software engineers include a photography section on their site.
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