|
MrBlandAverage posted:What makes a landscape interesting to you when you're looking at it without a camera in hand? Is simply "it's pretty" enough? There was a time when that was enough for me, and I've certainly posted many landscapes in this thread (including from Iceland!) that were boring because "it's pretty" was the only reason I pressed the shutter button. I can't give specific advice about how to take more interesting landscapes, but I can say that you should always be questioning your motivations for pressing the shutter button. What is it that you want to show us about a place, and why? Yeah I definitely need to think about this more when taking shots. Most of the time it’s something along the lines of “Hey that mountain and this bridge look nice together,” or “the angle of those buildings look kinda cool together.” It’s often just a gut feeling of “hey this looks neat” without thinking more about why I think it looks that way or what feeling it’s evoking, and how to best make a photograph to evoke that feeling (or even if it’s one worth evoking in the first place). xzzy posted:Don't try to impress specific people, you're just going to be ripping them off (and they'll spot it instantly too). That's why stuff on 500px is such forgettable garbage, it's a colossal circlejerk. That bit about impressing ansel autisms and MrBlandAverage was kind of a half-jokey way of saying I hope to one day improve enough to where others that I respect in the art form respect my work in turn. It’s not so much wanting to impress specific people, but rather wanting to improve my artist expression while also having said art be accepted by peers. But this isn’t an E/N thread so I probably should stop posting now. E: wow this was a terrible way to start a new page, here's actual content:  CodfishCartographer fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jul 31, 2019 |
#
?
Jul 31, 2019 20:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 09:39 |
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:That bit about impressing ansel autisms and MrBlandAverage was kind of a half-jokey way of saying I hope to one day improve enough to where others that I respect in the art form respect my work in turn. It’s not so much wanting to impress specific people, but rather wanting to improve my artist expression while also having said art be accepted by peers. But this isn’t an E/N thread so I probably should stop posting now. fwiw I read it the way you intended!
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2019 23:26
|
|
|
Alright. Here are 4 of my better photos of Iceland. I think they tell a story and I'm proud of them. Give me your worst. cbf3c235-b243-4712-9dbf-e0da2cfb4e55 by Esa Foto, on Flickr b50edbf4-b482-4c5a-b42e-516b9ff6942b by Esa Foto, on Flickr 0337ae4d-2885-4d28-9332-12f1c4e9250a by Esa Foto, on Flickr 7b09a5f1-e829-4926-be98-431b49f018d1 by Esa Foto, on Flickr
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 02:13
|
|
|
Well, since you asked -huhu posted:Alright. Here are 4 of my better photos of Iceland. I think they tell a story and I'm proud of them. Give me your worst. This is the best of the lot - there's definitely some tension between the vast space and the transmission lines going across it. But why did you frame it this way? The clouds don't add anything to the story about the transmission lines. I'd like to see more of how empty the land around them is - to me, that's the story here. huhu posted:
You've successfully conveyed that the weather is bad. Are those birds in the water? Is that a house across the cove or some other kind of structure? We can't see them clearly enough to know what they are for sure or what their presence in this scene should suggest to us. huhu posted:
Again, why so much of the sky? It doesn't tell us anything other than that it was cloudy. I'm way more interested in how the structures relate to their surroundings, but you've removed all of that context. huhu posted:
"Tourist looks at waterfall" isn't much of a story. There's not even any facial expression or body language for us to read into this person's relationship with the scene. I personally am very interested in the spaces that are constructed for tourists to look at things, which is hinted at here, but again this is a context you've chosen to minimize with your composition. Also, this scene looks like it has the most interesting lighting of the four photos, but the way you've processed it makes it super flat. That feels okayish with the lighting in the others, but it doesn't make sense to me here. Overall I get the sense that the story in all of these photographs is "huhu went to Iceland." You've stumbled across the problem that makes photography hard for all of us, and I'm not going to claim I'm successful at solving it all the time. It's easy to make photographs that are meaningful to yourself, but the rest of us have no connection to you or the moment you took those photographs. If you're hearing that your photos are boring, that means other people can't find something in the photo that has significance to them. Think about how to communicate something in your photos that's meaningful to viewers that aren't yourself.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 03:22
|
|
|
Skies need to be really loving dramatic to be including that much of it in frame.. like a town destroying supercell over Kansas type of dramatic. It needs to be a subject worth studying and your skies don't have the structures there to pull it off. Everything looks really underexposed too. The Dettifoss shot is the strongest of the bunch, but crop the person out. Having human elements in a landscape is a reasonable idea because it establishes scale, but it's not working here.. they look depressed and aren't involved with you at all. Square crop or 4x5 to the left of the fencepost kinda works for a "I was there" vacation shot but there's better angles at that location for that kind of stuff. All this is only relevant if your goal is to make a bunch of grand landscape shots that millions of other people (myself included) are doing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 03:45
|
|
|
fwiw, this guy takes my favourite photos of Iceland: @hjaltigud
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 03:52
|
|
|
I heard that we were posting questionable pictures in this thread.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 04:46
|
|
|
huhu posted:
I like the concept here but I think the failing is in post - more than the sky itself. One of the things that sticks most in my mind about iceland is the scale of everything. So the offsetting of the houses with the sky makes some sense in that context to me, but the photo itself is just flat. It has no detail, no particular draw to the eyes about it - anywhere. It might only get worse going into black and white - so I'd probably instead toy with trying to pop those buildings a bit, and then trying to get as much detail and differentiation into the clouds as possible for dramatic effect. Horrible Iceland Content: 
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 06:13
|
|
|
My contribution of a boring photo
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 06:30
|
|
|
Idiots it isn't an Iceland photo unless you take a pic from that place on the rock Iceland Division by Trevor Zuliani, on FlickrAnd take a pic of this dick rock surrounded by the Mandarin wedding photographers  Iceland Coast by Trevor Zuliani, on Flickr
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 06:33
|
|
|
These conversations about the purpose behind photography are excellent, and one of the things that most opened my eyes when I first discovered the Dorkroom. It's a shame that they seem to be disappearing over time. Personally, I think it's worth thinking about two things whenever you're going to take a picture, especially if that picture is part of a broader series: audience and purpose. Who am I talking to with this picture, and what am I trying to say to them. It is absolutely valid for the audience to be yourself, and your message to be "I wanted to capture a special moment." That's pretty much the essence of many of the photos we take when we travel. When you plan on sharing those images with a broader audience, though, there needs to be something more. And when you start considering audience/purpose beyond the cliche, you start to open up some real interesting possibilities with photography as an artform. I'm a long way from mastering this stuff - I'm always wistfully exploring photos in books, on Instagram, everywhere else by people who do it so much better. Anyway, it's all good and well to talk this stuff, but here's my attempt at illustrating the point. Last year I went to New Zealand, which is probably the second most photogenic place in the world behind Iceland, with a deliberate attempt to take photos that defied all expectations of typical holiday snaps -- I wanted to create something dark, ominous, the very antithesis of a gallery of joyful travel memories. Here's a few of the shots:     
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 13:06
|
|
|
elgarbo posted:
Mission accomplished.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 14:45
|
|
|
elgarbo posted:These conversations about the purpose behind photography are excellent, and one of the things that most opened my eyes when I first discovered the Dorkroom. It's a shame that they seem to be disappearing over time. I like these
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 15:37
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 15:39
|
|
|
How do you go about picking what feeling/idea you want to convey to what audience? Edit: thinking on the Iceland trip - I tried and perhaps failed to capture the vast nothingness and coldness of the country. huhu fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Aug 1, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 15:46
|
|
|
huhu posted:How do you go about picking what feeling/idea you want to convey to what audience? I think, sometimes, the first audience is yourself. I'm usually not picking feelings or ideas for any audience. You put your work out, and the audience that likes it will come. It is also quite hard to explain how to pick it - usually the concepts and ideas come from the photos.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 15:52
|
|
|
When you get on site and take in the weather conditions, come up with a word or phrase that summarizes your goal or mood. Repeat it in your head as you look through the viewfinder. It's very easy to slap on the ultra wide and machine gun everything around you, hoping to find "something good" after you load everything up in lightroom (which can work, but it's not goal oriented). So take control of your brain and force it to focus on what you want. The goal doesn't have to be anything terribly complex. It can be "abstract" or "depression" or "backlit" or whatever topic currently interests you. For landscapes time is important too. You need to be willing to spend half an hour (usually more) in a new location to wander around, see the angles, and find something that works. This is mostly why I bother with a camera at all, it forces me to stop and really experience a scene instead of hiking in, drinking some water, then hiking out.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 16:36
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 17:01
|
|
|
huhu posted:Edit: thinking on the Iceland trip - I tried and perhaps failed to capture the vast nothingness and coldness of the country. Everyone has their own taste, but out of everything you've posted from your trip, your selected 4 - which you figured were the best - are in my opinion some of the worst for conveying what you were after. I really like 2019_Iceland_030 for example, and I still think 0337ae4d-2885-4d28-9332-12f1c4e9250a is salvageable in post. But go back and look at 2019_2019-06-30_003 again. For a theme of 'nothingness' and 'coldness' - you've got something there.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 17:33
|
|
|
huhu posted:How do you go about picking what feeling/idea you want to convey to what audience? Who loving knows!
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 18:29
|
|
|
Sometimes just consuming photography from better people isn't enough, you gotta get into conversations or thoughts/essays. A good book that I think would help you, Huhu, is this one https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams...=gateway&sr=8-1
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 19:15
|
|
|
nice
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2019 23:58
|
|
|
a cyberpunk goose posted:Sometimes just consuming photography from better people isn't enough, you gotta get into conversations or thoughts/essays. A good book that I think would help you, Huhu, is this one https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams...=gateway&sr=8-1 Thanks for this. Usually I shoot for myself + friends and family, with an aim to remind me of how certain things felt at the time or to use as a visual for when I tell people about the things I've seen or done. But sometimes it just feels good to share something with a bunch of strangers on the internet. A positive reception is always nice and usually the criticisms are instructive and give me something to consider the next time I'm out with the camera. These were shot on the same flight, travelling from one job site to another. Manually focussing at 140+ kts at a few hundred feet through plastic windows isn't the most ideal but a few turned out. We passed over the remains of a massive forrest fire in the interior and then through some pretty rough weather amongst dramatic coastal mountains.   
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 00:05
|
|
|
a cyberpunk goose posted:Sometimes just consuming photography from better people isn't enough, you gotta get into conversations or thoughts/essays. A good book that I think would help you, Huhu, is this one https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams...=gateway&sr=8-1 Just ordered this. Rot - Really digging those first two.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 01:52
|
|
|
If we are discussing off-the-beaten-path vacation pics, I would like to trow my personal favorite into the mix. I was in Guam last year, and it was text book snorkeling every day. I often ventured into deeper waters as I am quite comfortable there, but I almost poo poo my pants when I first saw the outline of this contraption. I eventually realized that it was a thing designed to encourage the growth of coral.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 02:03
|
|
|
huhu posted:How do you go about picking what feeling/idea you want to convey to what audience? I guess the only way to develop those skills is to practice - take photos, develop your skills, notice patterns in what draws you to photographs. There's nothing wrong with "I want to portray this place as beautifully as I can" or "I want to capture an aesthetically pleasing image." Or you can subvert that and try to capture the beauty in a really ugly place, or the ugliness in a beautiful place. Or you can want to show interesting spaces. Or you might notice that Icelandic Chinese restaurants have a really weird vibe and you want to show their variety. Or you could want to make some comment about the interaction between human spaces and natural environments. Or whatever. Whatever grabs your fancy. In your case, "I want to capture the vastness and coldness of this place" is a totally valid intent. The power lines photo aligns with this purpose really well. Your others have some technical issues and some compositional issues that draw me, as a viewer, to different places. This is just where continued practice will help refine your final output. In the end, though, if you can pull up an album of your Iceland photos and they make you feel good and let you reminisce about an awesome trip to a weird photogenic place, then you've achieved something cool and good. Making the step from photos that speak to ourselves to photos that speak to others who have none of the context that exists outside the frame is a daunting and difficult task but by engaging in this sort of dialogue in a constructive and non-defensive way, you're already more likely to get there than 99.99% of photographers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 02:49
|
|
|
elgarbo posted:...engaging in this sort of dialogue in a constructive and non-defensive way, you're already more likely to get there than 99.99% of photographers. This is something that I try to work on. It's easy to get precious, so when someone is like, "yeah not feeling it because..." my first reaction tends to be "bb..bbbbut you just don't understand!!"  But then I think about it a little bit and more often than not there's something to consider. By the way, I'm really enjoying this discussion, thanks everyone.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 03:11
|
|
|
Although we usually say to shoot for yourself first, the "discussion with a community" part within the iterative process can be very useful. For example, the process could be to shoot, curate a set of photos, review what concepts or ideas evolve from this set, then use them as a basis for your next photowalk, then curate a new set of photos from the walk to either add-on or start a new set, etc. The non-interactive way of improving might be to look at good photobooks or other photographer's photos and see how they do their work. As a start, copying is actually okay but by using their works as a framework to improve yours, eventually your photos should (in theory) evolve into something that is more yours than just a copy. Adding on to this, you have the interactive part which is engaging in dialogue and critique with other peers. As what elgarbo described, being non-defensive and open really helps to understand how people see and react your work, and you can accept their feedback but you don't always have to agree with it - because ultimately you have the final say. We're all standing on the shoulders of other photographers!
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 03:29
|
|
|
Not really anything to do with landscapes (I'm still very much caught up in the scenic vistas mode with those, and only occasionally manage something different and interesting), but I go to Le Mans 24hrs most years, and looking through my photos, it's always the same "car in pit garage being worked on by mechanics", "parked race car", "panning shot of race cars", and while they're cool to me as a "I was there" memoir, they're really loving boring photos. So one year I just decided to put my 60mm macro on and take only detail shots of bits of cars - vents, logos, lights, latches, etc. - and those are among the best photos I've ever taken there.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 03:59
|
|
|
Finger Prince posted:Not really anything to do with landscapes (I'm still very much caught up in the scenic vistas mode with those, and only occasionally manage something different and interesting), but I go to Le Mans 24hrs most years, and looking through my photos, it's always the same "car in pit garage being worked on by mechanics", "parked race car", "panning shot of race cars", and while they're cool to me as a "I was there" memoir, they're really loving boring photos. So one year I just decided to put my 60mm macro on and take only detail shots of bits of cars - vents, logos, lights, latches, etc. - and those are among the best photos I've ever taken there. Now lay them all out on the floor together with your normal Le Mans photos and I think creating a sequence that picks from both sets should be quite interesting (hopefully).
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 06:48
|
|
|
 Heide Kalmthout by roland luijken, on Flickr
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2019 09:09
|
|
|
I got you fam Encrypted fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Oct 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2019 12:38
|
|
|
elgarbo posted:In the end, though, if you can pull up an album of your Iceland photos and they make you feel good and let you reminisce about an awesome trip to a weird photogenic place, then you've achieved something cool and good. Making the step from photos that speak to ourselves to photos that speak to others who have none of the context that exists outside the frame is a daunting and difficult task but by engaging in this sort of dialogue in a constructive and non-defensive way, you're already more likely to get there than 99.99% of photographers. Oh man that's exactly how I feel about pretty much all the photos I take. I take them to please myself but still open to criticism and would love to try something different if anyone has some suggestions or different take on things. It's a fine line between circle  ,self indulgence and enjoying things for your own sake without trying to please others but still striving to improve.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2019 12:47
|
|
|
Here, instead of empty and interesting Iceland, have empty and . . . empty Nebraska. Nebraska by B. B., on Flickr
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2019 17:56
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2019 19:28
|
|
|
Nebraska has some really pretty spots. Obviously there's a ton of corn fields but if you hunt around there's some good stuff. US-20 is one of my favorite drives through the midwest. Kansas, on the other hand, is abysmal. There's a couple chalk formations maybe worth seeing but the rest of it is a lot of "get me out of here asap."
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2019 21:40
|
|
|
xzzy posted:Kansas, on the other hand, is abysmal. There's a couple chalk formations maybe worth seeing but the rest of it is a lot of "get me out of here asap." I remember taking the Pike's Peak cog railway and the tour guide lady on the train was pointing out the points of interest as we were going past. "If you look out to the right there isn't anything to see. Well, that's Kansas."
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2019 07:00
|
|
|
toggle fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Aug 10, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2019 09:34
|
|
|
a cyberpunk goose posted:Sometimes just consuming photography from better people isn't enough, you gotta get into conversations or thoughts/essays. A good book that I think would help you, Huhu, is this one https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams...=gateway&sr=8-1 A quarter of a way through this book and I'm feeling like I'm about off the plataeu I've been on and I'm climbing upward again.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2019 15:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 09:39 |
|
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2019 05:06
|
|