“How to find photo opportunities?” is not an inherently bad question, but in my opinion the right answer shouldn’t be “well, you can take photos of X, Y and Z”.

“How to find photo opportunities?” is not an inherently bad question, but in my opinion the right answer shouldn’t be “well, you can take photos of X, Y and Z”. The right answer should be a counter-question: “well, why don’t you see opportunities for photography around you, including in your home?”. The answer should have more to do with learning to see beauty/stories in the mundane, learning to capture/communicate them to others by way of photography (e.g., learning to work with existing light and recognizing the effects time of day or year, weather or air pollution have on it), and having the right equipment in the right situation (because even if you see a scene and know how to communicate it, it’s still pointless if you shoot a 1+ kg bulky setup that you can’t easily carry everywhere without thinking, or have to swap lenses while the moment goes away, or you envision a long exposure shot but it’s too bright and you forgot your ND filters). Without changing my location, one week I see a lot of things I want to photograph, another week barely any. It’s not easy to intentionally get into the former state unless I go somewhere new (yes, at first I was fascinated by Hong Kong’s neon advertisement too) or get new gear to play with, and it’s not always good to be in it because many of the resulting photos are low value junk. It’s easy to accidentally slip into the latter state by neglecting mental health (being preoccupied, burning out, or just in bad shape), and it’s always not good to be in it. Looking at the photos taken by the author, I feel “seen” so to speak because I do a lot of the same—and I am trying to stop, because I think it’s a dead end when the photo doesn’t tell a story, especially now that a realistic photo of X, Y or Z can be generated on demand for a few cents they have little value.