6 ms·

One thing that makes photography collections extremely flat is a lack of people. A lot of programmers like photography and a lot of their albums, I'm sorry to

One thing that makes photography collections extremely flat is a lack of people. A lot of programmers like photography and a lot of their albums, I'm sorry to say, just aren't good and a huge part of it is because these albums lack people portraits or photos that tell a story. Finding inanimate objects for photography is honestly trivial which is largely what this blog is talking about. There's three types of photos with people. Taking a photo that happens to have people in it (unsuspecting bystanders), taking a photo of an unsuspecting person where he/she is the main subject of the photo and taking a photo of a person you asked if you can take a photo of him/her. The first style of photography is one photographers mistakenly avoid. They want some pristine capture of some landscape or object without people, but they don't realize that often people enhance the photo via the illustration of a story or providing a sense of scale. The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care. The end result is a collection of photos illustrating an apocalyptic earth where all humans have suddenly vanished. The blog post is in fact unknowingly promoting this style of photography.

matthewmcg 3y ago
This is so true. Another factor: when there are people in pictures, they're often looking at phones. My Dad ( https://petermcgrath.me/#/people https://petermcgrath.me/#/people ) is a great enthusiast of "street photography." He doesn't sell his work, but it's more than a hobby for him--Garry Winograd was one of his graduate school instructors and he's been shooting actively since the late 1960s. He says his big challenge in the last decade has been finding interesting shots of people when most in a crowd are looking down.
- nimrody 3y ago
  Your dad has a beautiful street gallery. Thanks for sharing!
codingdave 3y ago
Please tell me you are only talking about urban photography. Because there is more life in this world than just people, and if you honestly feel that nature photography without humans is apocalyptic, that is a really bleak outlook on the vast diversity of life and beauty in our world.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  Replace people with living things. My argument still applies. Even for nature photography people can be a part of it. For nature though I typically expect a lot of animals not just landscapes, textures and macro shots of plants all the time.
  - ggerules 3y ago
    I still partially disagree with the "must have people" the subject. There is a whole branch of nature photography that is for scientific purposes. Many of these are stunningly beautiful. As an example take a look at the work done Cornell Ornithology lab with crowd sourced observations of birds. Many of these observations come with pictures submitted to track some 10,000+ species of birds around our earth. Some of these species are near extinction or are extinct. Pictures of even the most common birds are uploaded and help scientists verify location and behavior of birds. The "best" pictures created are crowd rated and are quite beautiful. There is a protocol for rating these pictures by the crowd. See link below for further evidence. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home EDIT: Added a more specific example of a beautiful vulnerable bird the Shoebill and an example of the ratings system. https://ebird.org/species/shoebi1 https://ebird.org/species/shoebi1
    - Herval_freire 3y ago
      I should generalize the argument with more nuance. Not that a "photo" must have "people". More accurately an "album" must have "living things". So a collection of photos must contain photos (not all) that have some living thing in it. There are some cases where this rule of thumb doesn't apply but, in general, a good album follows this rule.
hef19898 3y ago
Photography is an art. And as with art, there is no "good" or "bad" art, only something that meets personal taste or not. Dismissing one form of art because of personal taste, is, well, weird. Edit: Anselm Adams was a landscape photographer, a really good one. I think his work and portfolio is impressive without people in it. On the other hand, Henri Cartier-Bresson created an equally impressive catalogue of work with basically no landscapes in it. That alone proofs that both photographic styles are equally valid. As is architecture photography, and fankly, any other style.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  How is having personal taste weird? It's not weird at all given all people have personal taste and all people dismiss things or promote things based off of their own preferences. Additionally there is also the shared reality of human tastes and preferences. There is certainly art that a majority of humans find good and the majority of humans find bad. It makes sense to speak to this majority preference.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Personal taste isn't weird. Judging work not meeting that taste based said taste alone, well, that is weird. Edit: Just a tid bit, coming from some experience in travel photography, taking pictures of people, when said people are the main subject, absolutely requires their permission. Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency. I'd add even after the fact, in case you shot a spontanous scene and the person is clearly identifyable. Working, even as an amateur, based on the rules of photo journalism is a good thing to do.
    - Herval_freire 3y ago
      >Personal taste isn't weird. Judging work not meeting that taste based said taste alone, well, that is weird. Why not. All judgement by individuals is made off of personal opinions. It's not weird at all. In fact your judgement of me here is also personal taste. I personally think judgement based off of personal taste is not weird at all. >Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency. I disagree. I have experience with travel photography too. I ask only when I want a close up portrait, otherwise I don't ask and I don't make a big deal out of it. If the culture has a huge problem with it, then I may respect the culture to avoid confrontation, but if not, again, I don't go out of my way to ask as if it was a huge problem to begin with because it's not.
packetlost 3y ago
As someone who loves doing street photography, I agree with all of this. It's not impossible to tell a story without people, but it's a whole lot harder. > The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care. Most people won't notice or care either. In the thousands of street photos I've taken, I've had exactly one person give me trouble (it was a stupid situation to give me trouble too, it was literally crowd of people and he wasn't even in the center of frame) and maybe a few people notice and gesture a negative (which I respected). I've asked people to take their pictures, but as soon as you do it sorta ruins it IMO, but I'm also not particularly interested in portraiture.
belugacat 3y ago
> It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care. I agree with just going for it when it comes to asking strangers for their portrait. If you’re friendly and confident (and know how to take rejection swiftly and just move on), you’ll have a 90%+ success rate. Having a weird old film camera bumps that up even more, in my experience. So does opening with a compliment (“oh wow I love your outfit”). However, taking a portrait of someone without their consent in 2023 is just a dick move. This debate has been had so many times under so many angles that you just can’t claim ignorance anymore if you take yourself seriously as a photographer. A great book I enjoyed recently is Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities. Depending on where you are in the world and whether you obviously fit in within the cultural fabric or not, people might get very offended/aggressive about it (you deserved it), or not say anything but that doesn’t make you any less of a dick. Just ask. It can be as simple as pointing to your camera and showing a thumbs up with a quizzical look waiting for a nod in busy situations, it’ll take a second. If the person is performing/selling/etc, buying something/leaving a tip beforehand will help a lot. If asking scares you so much, that picture isn’t yours to take.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  I promote both asking and just taking it. Asking for a photo produces something different then just taking it. Personally the whole dick move thing I don't care about. It's such a minor thing. It's true though that you don't want to start a fight, so use judgement on that but in terms of being a dick it's actually not a big deal.
  - belugacat 3y ago
    > Personally the whole dick move thing I don't care about. I’ve met many such photographers when traveling, yep. They make things worse for all of us.
    - Herval_freire 3y ago
      >They make things worse for all of us. This is an exaggeration. 99.99 percent of the time nobody cares. Why? Because it's really not a huge deal.
waffletower 3y ago
Would be really nice to have a downvote button for this one. The above is riddled with broad brush bigotry and chauvinism. This belief is hilarious in 2023, well during the selfie-camera epoch. People are definitely not going away from photography anytime soon. What a hostile overreaction.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  There is a downvote button once you pass a certain number of karma points you can take your reactionary opinion and downvote people without consideration to nuance. I prefer a comment like this so I can explain myself. I'm not referring to smart phone photos and Instagram feeds. This post more pertains to "professional" photography albums on people's blogs where the photo was taken by a mirrorless or DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses. A lot of software engineers have this "photography" hobby but the thing is their photography always has a particular style of being devoid of people. Check it out, every once in a while you may encounter such a profile or blog of an engineer. Just look at his photography albums on his personal website. No people, usually.
  - waffletower 3y ago
    If it isn't landscapes, you are going to see a near literal sea of faces in the of portfolios of most professional photographers. Why attack the search for art, beauty or interest in what you might find mundane? Since you mentioned it again, is your prejudice against software engineers self-hate, or a more distant loathing?
    - Herval_freire 3y ago
      It's not an attack. Just an opinion. Just like you have an opinion different from mine. You should not downvote someone for having a different opinion. You're exaggerating this opinion by calling me prejudice against software engineers and using words like self hate. Again I just have an opinion. Landscapes imo should not always exclude people. I often include people to illustrate scale. It doesn't have to be a sea of faces all the time, but a lot of photographers follow this idea of keeping their landscape photos pristine and devoid of anything with a person.
mc32 3y ago
Some examples of the above (though in no way canonical): Bystander by Joel Meyerowitz Heads by DiCorcia Portraits by Richard Avedon If you want Americana, then Stephen Shore.
jl6 3y ago
If this kind of pseudo art photography isn’t already dead, AI models will finish it off shortly. There is no juice left in photography that is concerned with gear, geometric coincidence and photoshop.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  It's dead already in the sense that you won't see this stuff published on the news or anything. As a hobby though I don't think it will ever die. You'll see a lot of this stuff on personal blogs or websites. A lot of software engineers include a photography section on their site.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
maurits 3y ago
Whats' with the negativity? Its an individual (leisure) pursuit and you are not influenced in any way shape or form by what other people like to photograph.
- b_y 3y ago
  [dead]
genman 3y ago
You like people on photos, other people don't. End of story.
- Herval_freire 3y ago
  [dead]

matthewmcg 3y ago

This is so true. Another factor: when there are people in pictures, they're often looking at phones. My Dad ( https://petermcgrath.me/#/people https://petermcgrath.me/#/people ) is a great enthusiast of "street photography." He doesn't sell his work, but it's more than a hobby for him--Garry Winograd was one of his graduate school instructors and he's been shooting actively since the late 1960s. He says his big challenge in the last decade has been finding interesting shots of people when most in a crowd are looking down.

nimrody 3y ago
Your dad has a beautiful street gallery. Thanks for sharing!

codingdave 3y ago

Please tell me you are only talking about urban photography. Because there is more life in this world than just people, and if you honestly feel that nature photography without humans is apocalyptic, that is a really bleak outlook on the vast diversity of life and beauty in our world.

Herval_freire 3y ago
Replace people with living things. My argument still applies. Even for nature photography people can be a part of it. For nature though I typically expect a lot of animals not just landscapes, textures and macro shots of plants all the time.
- ggerules 3y ago
  I still partially disagree with the "must have people" the subject. There is a whole branch of nature photography that is for scientific purposes. Many of these are stunningly beautiful. As an example take a look at the work done Cornell Ornithology lab with crowd sourced observations of birds. Many of these observations come with pictures submitted to track some 10,000+ species of birds around our earth. Some of these species are near extinction or are extinct. Pictures of even the most common birds are uploaded and help scientists verify location and behavior of birds. The "best" pictures created are crowd rated and are quite beautiful. There is a protocol for rating these pictures by the crowd. See link below for further evidence. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home EDIT: Added a more specific example of a beautiful vulnerable bird the Shoebill and an example of the ratings system. https://ebird.org/species/shoebi1 https://ebird.org/species/shoebi1
  - Herval_freire 3y ago
    I should generalize the argument with more nuance. Not that a "photo" must have "people". More accurately an "album" must have "living things". So a collection of photos must contain photos (not all) that have some living thing in it. There are some cases where this rule of thumb doesn't apply but, in general, a good album follows this rule.

hef19898 3y ago

Photography is an art. And as with art, there is no "good" or "bad" art, only something that meets personal taste or not. Dismissing one form of art because of personal taste, is, well, weird. Edit: Anselm Adams was a landscape photographer, a really good one. I think his work and portfolio is impressive without people in it. On the other hand, Henri Cartier-Bresson created an equally impressive catalogue of work with basically no landscapes in it. That alone proofs that both photographic styles are equally valid. As is architecture photography, and fankly, any other style.

Herval_freire 3y ago
How is having personal taste weird? It's not weird at all given all people have personal taste and all people dismiss things or promote things based off of their own preferences. Additionally there is also the shared reality of human tastes and preferences. There is certainly art that a majority of humans find good and the majority of humans find bad. It makes sense to speak to this majority preference.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Personal taste isn't weird. Judging work not meeting that taste based said taste alone, well, that is weird. Edit: Just a tid bit, coming from some experience in travel photography, taking pictures of people, when said people are the main subject, absolutely requires their permission. Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency. I'd add even after the fact, in case you shot a spontanous scene and the person is clearly identifyable. Working, even as an amateur, based on the rules of photo journalism is a good thing to do.
  - Herval_freire 3y ago
    >Personal taste isn't weird. Judging work not meeting that taste based said taste alone, well, that is weird. Why not. All judgement by individuals is made off of personal opinions. It's not weird at all. In fact your judgement of me here is also personal taste. I personally think judgement based off of personal taste is not weird at all. >Out of respect, out of basic politeness and basic decency. I disagree. I have experience with travel photography too. I ask only when I want a close up portrait, otherwise I don't ask and I don't make a big deal out of it. If the culture has a huge problem with it, then I may respect the culture to avoid confrontation, but if not, again, I don't go out of my way to ask as if it was a huge problem to begin with because it's not.

packetlost 3y ago

As someone who loves doing street photography, I agree with all of this. It's not impossible to tell a story without people, but it's a whole lot harder. > The later two style of photos people avoid out of fear. It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care. Most people won't notice or care either. In the thousands of street photos I've taken, I've had exactly one person give me trouble (it was a stupid situation to give me trouble too, it was literally crowd of people and he wasn't even in the center of frame) and maybe a few people notice and gesture a negative (which I respected). I've asked people to take their pictures, but as soon as you do it sorta ruins it IMO, but I'm also not particularly interested in portraiture.

belugacat 3y ago

> It's quite scary to ask someone for their photo and it's a bit rude to take photo without permission. I advise you to just go for it and not care. I agree with just going for it when it comes to asking strangers for their portrait. If you’re friendly and confident (and know how to take rejection swiftly and just move on), you’ll have a 90%+ success rate. Having a weird old film camera bumps that up even more, in my experience. So does opening with a compliment (“oh wow I love your outfit”). However, taking a portrait of someone without their consent in 2023 is just a dick move. This debate has been had so many times under so many angles that you just can’t claim ignorance anymore if you take yourself seriously as a photographer. A great book I enjoyed recently is Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities. Depending on where you are in the world and whether you obviously fit in within the cultural fabric or not, people might get very offended/aggressive about it (you deserved it), or not say anything but that doesn’t make you any less of a dick. Just ask. It can be as simple as pointing to your camera and showing a thumbs up with a quizzical look waiting for a nod in busy situations, it’ll take a second. If the person is performing/selling/etc, buying something/leaving a tip beforehand will help a lot. If asking scares you so much, that picture isn’t yours to take.

Herval_freire 3y ago
I promote both asking and just taking it. Asking for a photo produces something different then just taking it. Personally the whole dick move thing I don't care about. It's such a minor thing. It's true though that you don't want to start a fight, so use judgement on that but in terms of being a dick it's actually not a big deal.
- belugacat 3y ago
  > Personally the whole dick move thing I don't care about. I’ve met many such photographers when traveling, yep. They make things worse for all of us.
  - Herval_freire 3y ago
    >They make things worse for all of us. This is an exaggeration. 99.99 percent of the time nobody cares. Why? Because it's really not a huge deal.

waffletower 3y ago

Would be really nice to have a downvote button for this one. The above is riddled with broad brush bigotry and chauvinism. This belief is hilarious in 2023, well during the selfie-camera epoch. People are definitely not going away from photography anytime soon. What a hostile overreaction.

Herval_freire 3y ago
There is a downvote button once you pass a certain number of karma points you can take your reactionary opinion and downvote people without consideration to nuance. I prefer a comment like this so I can explain myself. I'm not referring to smart phone photos and Instagram feeds. This post more pertains to "professional" photography albums on people's blogs where the photo was taken by a mirrorless or DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses. A lot of software engineers have this "photography" hobby but the thing is their photography always has a particular style of being devoid of people. Check it out, every once in a while you may encounter such a profile or blog of an engineer. Just look at his photography albums on his personal website. No people, usually.
- waffletower 3y ago
  If it isn't landscapes, you are going to see a near literal sea of faces in the of portfolios of most professional photographers. Why attack the search for art, beauty or interest in what you might find mundane? Since you mentioned it again, is your prejudice against software engineers self-hate, or a more distant loathing?
  - Herval_freire 3y ago
    It's not an attack. Just an opinion. Just like you have an opinion different from mine. You should not downvote someone for having a different opinion. You're exaggerating this opinion by calling me prejudice against software engineers and using words like self hate. Again I just have an opinion. Landscapes imo should not always exclude people. I often include people to illustrate scale. It doesn't have to be a sea of faces all the time, but a lot of photographers follow this idea of keeping their landscape photos pristine and devoid of anything with a person.

mc32 3y ago

Some examples of the above (though in no way canonical): Bystander by Joel Meyerowitz Heads by DiCorcia Portraits by Richard Avedon If you want Americana, then Stephen Shore.

jl6 3y ago

If this kind of pseudo art photography isn’t already dead, AI models will finish it off shortly. There is no juice left in photography that is concerned with gear, geometric coincidence and photoshop.

Herval_freire 3y ago
It's dead already in the sense that you won't see this stuff published on the news or anything. As a hobby though I don't think it will ever die. You'll see a lot of this stuff on personal blogs or websites. A lot of software engineers include a photography section on their site.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

maurits 3y ago

Whats' with the negativity? Its an individual (leisure) pursuit and you are not influenced in any way shape or form by what other people like to photograph.

b_y 3y ago
[dead]

genman 3y ago

You like people on photos, other people don't. End of story.

Herval_freire 3y ago
[dead]