Finding Photo Opportunities Near Home
phillipreeve.net
phillipreeve.net
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.
Edit: Just a tid bit, coming from some experience in travel photography, taking pictures of people, when said people are the main subject, absolutely requires their permission. Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency. I'd add even after the fact, in case you shot a spontanous scene and the person is clearly identifyable. Working, even as an amateur, based on the rules of photo journalism is a good thing to do.
Also laws may vary depending upon where you are.
Why not. All judgement by individuals is made off of personal opinions. It's not weird at all. In fact your judgement of me here is also personal taste. I personally think judgement based off of personal taste is not weird at all.
>Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency.
I disagree. I have experience with travel photography too. I ask only when I want a close up portrait, otherwise I don't ask and I don't make a big deal out of it.
If the culture has a huge problem with it, then I may respect the culture to avoid confrontation, but if not, again, I don't go out of my way to ask as if it was a huge problem to begin with because it's not.
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.
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.
https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home
EDIT: Added a more specific example of a beautiful vulnerable bird the Shoebill and an example of the ratings system.
More accurately an "album" must have "living things". So a collection of photos must contain photos (not all) that have some living thing in it. There are some cases where this rule of thumb doesn't apply but, in general, a good album follows this rule.
It has discussed in other comments as well, but you seem to only grudgingly acknowledge that other people's preferences are as valid as your own, and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed. It comes off as arrogant and disrespectful.
No. The reason is because a lot of the people on this thread are also people who take these huge photo albums that are full of just random geometry and devoid of animals or people. As with 99% of humanity, people take negative opinions or criticism against them as a personal attack. That's just the way people are. People need to get defensive rather then face a possible reality that their hobby and personal works are just not good.
> and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed.
They don't have to be followed but they "must" be followed for the album to be "good" in the eyes of the general public. There is a shared reality here that exists outside of peoples individual preferences. Good books exist, good movies exist, but also Bad movies exist and horrible books exist that represent a sort of mass social group consensus on a topic. You either acknowledge that reality or you live in a delusional bubble.
I am saying this. For most of these photography albums taken by software engineers that are devoid of people and only contain inanimate objects, most honest people will think those photo albums are boring and not good in general. You can make make a point that I am wrong about this general consensus. That many people actually find those photo albums to be amazing.
But to call me arrogant and disrespectful? That's wrong. I respect everyone, but that does not preclude me from sharing my opinion however negative it is. I will not lie. "Must" is an appropriate all encompassing word here in expressing a general consensus on the topic I am addressing.
Additionally you should know that I have a lot of upvotes on the parent comment because people agree. I have downvotes on some of the branching threads from people who took it personally. Overall the evidence on this thread supports my thesis in that the general population agrees with me.
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.
Or, to say the same thing much less cynically: as an introvert I use photography as a solitary activity in order to recharge - so I naturally gravitate towards people-free locations when I have the camera in hand. None of what you say is false, of course - but when I pick up the camera my goal isn't necessarily to produce the most meaningful or poignant image possible, nor even to produce something that necessarily resonates with anyone else.
But I do have a desire to produce great photos that meet my own standards of quality and including people is one of my personal standards.
If you've never tried such a thing, I recommend you try at least once to produce an album that includes a lot of photos interspersed with a good amount of people and portraits. Its definitely more uncomfortable to create such an album but personally, for me it enhances the album much more. Just a recommendation from one introvert to another.
Some public events explicitly provide a role for volunteer photography and policy for that role:
https://volunteer.parkrun.com/principles/photography-policy
Every week there will be a group of people running and jogging and walking around the same 5k parkrun courses. Every week is another opportunity to make pictures from a different position, or make different pictures from the same position, or perfect the same picture.
You should not downvote someone for having a different opinion.
You're exaggerating this opinion by calling me prejudice against software engineers and using words like self hate. Again I just have an opinion.
Landscapes imo should not always exclude people. I often include people to illustrate scale. It doesn't have to be a sea of faces all the time, but a lot of photographers follow this idea of keeping their landscape photos pristine and devoid of anything with a person.
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.
I’ve met many such photographers when traveling, yep. They make things worse for all of us.
This is an exaggeration. 99.99 percent of the time nobody cares. Why? Because it's really not a huge deal.
Nobody cares. At most they will be slightly annoyed, but ultimately they forget about it in a minute. A lot of people (like you) are just scared of this slight annoyance, your mind over blows it and your behavior becomes controlled by every small thought other people think of you.
Even in countries where it's not culturally appropriate. Often they're just annoyed because of culture, because they grew up and were taught that it's impolite to take pictures. They aren't in actuality annoyed because nothing really happened... and they forget about it quick. Stop being scared, and stop accusing me of choosing to believe things.
Bystander by Joel Meyerowitz
Heads by DiCorcia
Portraits by Richard Avedon
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.