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Death by prettiness

Mike Johnson writes on photo.net of scenic fatigue, which is what I was trying to get at a while ago.

What instigated these thoughts was that I recently spent several hours poking around on a large picture-posting site (I won't name it explicitly, to try to avoid hurting anyone's feelings). For the most part what I looked at are amateur pictures, and not even polished, finished presentations — just a large mass of random pictures that people have taken, and, for some reason, liked. So it wouldn't be proper or fair to criticize too harshly just because what's presented isn't always art.

When I first start looking at large numbers of snapshots, I can get excited about possibilities, and my mind is full of comments I might make to the photographers. But after a while, a particular kind of fatigue sets in.[...]

I get this feeling quite strongly, and it has pretty much turned me off sites where people post random photos. Partly it is this fatigue, and partly it's just that other people far better photos of sunsets than me: they're more creative, more patient, more skilled, have better gear, better luck, or whatever.

When you choose to take a sunset, you have to really engage with sunsets — learn how to look at them, learn how to distinguish among them. What are the best sunset pictures? How to they work? How does yours stack up? Instead of taking one sunset and being satisfied, you ought to take a hundred sunsets and choose one.

What I want to do is make a good representation of how the moment felt to me. This is something I won't get from looking at any number of other photographs of similar scenes, however technically or aesthetically excellent. And it's still a challenge; merely taking a random photograph at a moment doesn't necessarily capture that moment.

posted Mon 11 Oct 2004 in /photo | link

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