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Comment by Herval_freire | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Perhaps the programmers you're talking about don't like people very much, and would prefer not to have them polluting our photos!

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.

Totally agree. If that's the goal then great. I'm an introvert myself and I completely relate.

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.

Yeah, it's good to step outside the comfort zone sometimes. Most recently for me that was taking photos at a cycle event - trying to remember to pay attention to the background and framing even in the heat of the moment!

Repetition is helpful in discovering what we like about particular kinds-of picture and learning successful techniques.

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.

https://www.parkrun.com/

If it isn't landscapes, you are going to see a near literal sea of faces in the of portfolios of most professional photographers. Why attack the search for art, beauty or interest in what you might find mundane? Since you mentioned it again, is your prejudice against software engineers self-hate, or a more distant loathing?

It's not an attack. Just an opinion. Just like you have an opinion different from mine.

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.

Seems like landscape plus someone wearing scarlet has long been cliche :-)

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