We’ve all done it.
We see something interesting and pull out our camera and start shooting.
Sunsets, cute kids, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, etc. The list goes on and on…
What’s the most common outcome? A boring shot of a very cool subject, which is certainly not the same as a cool shot.
What are we doing wrong? I think the problem is that we’re confusing the 3 dimensional ‘real world’ with the 2 dimensional world of a photographic image.
I had a photography professor who said this: ‘Don’t look through your viewfinder, look at it’.
That’s a really interesting point. If you look through it, you project the 3 dimensionality into what you’re seeing. You’re keeping the context of the scene intact (including your emotional attachment to it). If you look at it, you notice the interaction of the shadows and the highlights, you see the framing of the scene, you notice the out-of-place elements in the foreground, and the annoying things in the background.
It’s not a perfect tip, but it’s a very useful one.
I’ve probably taken three or four thousand pictures of the Grand Canyon. Four or five of them came out pretty well… At least I’m not shooting film anymore.
There’s an interesting discussion about how your brain looks at photographs in “Welcome to your brain” by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang. They use the example of why we often take photos that look like there is a tree growing out of some one’s head. It’s because in real life, we have no problem discerning the different objects (the tree vs. the person), so there’s no mental confusion. In the 2 dimensional photo, we can’t make that distinction as easily. They also point out that looking at a photograph is more complex (to our brain) than playing chess. (And we thought we were just looking at pretty pictures.)
Interesting pictures can come from very mundane things – or very interesting things. Whether it’s an interesting image is up to us, not the subject.