Photographing an iconic city or just a hometown

This week on The Practicing Photographer, I'm standing here in San Francisco in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's the big red thing out there. A iconic sight in San Francisco along with cable cars and roads of colorful Victorian houses. The kind of images that you think, boy, that must make San Francisco a really great place to shoot. And I'm going to argue this week that actually these things can make San Francisco a really difficult place to shoot. For a reason that can actually trouble you no matter where your shooting.

So here in San Francisco, there are a lot of things that we've all seen in photos and TV shows and movies. And, of course, it's really fun to go out and shoot those things. You can, in fact, by books of images and their locations telling you exactly where you can go and get specific photos in San Francisco and lots of other cities. And there is merit to recreating a photograph that you've seen somewhere else. It's interesting to learn how to solve problems that another photographer has solved problems that you may not realize until you try and solve them yourself.

But, I think the danger of coming to a place like San Francisco and thinking, I want to go out and find those San Francisco photos, is it puts you in the wrong state of mind. Because it puts you in the mind of going out to find photos. And the fact is, the best photographers never go out looking for photos. For the simple fact that it is very, very difficult to recognize a photo when you're out walking around. It's very hard to visualize that particular crop that you're camera takes. It's very difficult to, with the naked eye, compress that three dimensional world down to a flat two dimensional image.

So now matter where you are, whether you're in a place that has very obvious photos (seagulls calling) and seagulls, or if you're shooting in a place that you might consider more mundane or a place that you're really used to, you're going to have a hard time if you go out looking to see finished images with your naked eye. What you want to do is go out and look for things that are interesting to you. Go out and look for things that capture your eye. Now in some cases, that's going to be an object or a subject like the Golden Gate Bridge. That's a pretty obvious photo subject. But in other cases, it might simply be a play of light or a play of light and shadow or a texture.

It doesn't matter what it is that captures your eye or why it captures your eye or even if it's got potential to be a good photo. The first thing you do is open yourself up (seagulls calling) to recognize those things. When you do, then you lift your camera to your eye and you start trying to figure out if there's a photo there. The world and the things that interest you in it are your raw material. Your camera is what you use to turn that raw material into a photo. Now that sounds easy enough to do as I say it right now. The tricky part is learning to pay attention to what it is that interests you.

Because a lot of times you might go, hey, that's interesting. And then look closer at it and think, well I can't imagine what the photo might be. Just because you can't imagine it, doesn't mean there isn't a photo there. A lot of times you can't tell what the photo is until you're looking through that frame. I see a lot of students walking around not looking through their cameras and then saying, well I'm not seeing any pictures. Of course your not seeing any pictures. You can't see pictures a lot of times unless you're looking in your, looking through your camera, and working the shot, and figuring out how to take the raw material that interests you and turn it into a photo.

The other thing that this approach gets you is it's how you develop your own style and put your own visual stamp on the photographic world. Taking a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge has been done many times. They're probably lots of more great photos of it to be had. But they're only going to be had by people seeing it the way they see it, by people recognizing what it is that they find interesting and trying to figure out a way to represent that. If you can do that, you're going to begin to start taking pictures that haven't been seen before.