After all these years of photography, I know what will make me stop.
A beautiful sunset can do it. So can wildlife, a waterfall, an old building, an interesting street, or a moment that suddenly comes together in front of me. Sometimes it’s the light more than the subject. I can be driving somewhere and notice the way late afternoon light is hitting a field or the side of a building, and immediately I start wondering whether there’s a photograph there.
That’s what experience does. The more we photograph, the faster we become at recognizing the things that interest us.
But recently I started wondering about something I hadn’t really considered before.
What have I become good at walking past?
That question caught me off guard because I’ve always thought of experience as something that helps me see more. After decades with a camera, I notice light differently. I pay attention to backgrounds, angles, colors, expressions, weather, and small changes in a scene that someone without a camera may never think about.
Still, there has to be another side to that.
If I’ve spent years learning what catches my eye, then I’ve probably spent just as many years deciding, often without realizing it, what doesn’t.
Think about all the things we see during an ordinary day. Parking lots. Shopping carts. Utility poles. Hospital hallways. Gas stations. Store windows. Empty chairs. Driveways. Road signs. Someone’s hands while they’re working. A coffee cup left on a table after the person has gone.
Most of the time, I wouldn’t think about taking my camera out for any of those things.
I’d just keep walking.
That doesn’t mean I suddenly want to spend the next month photographing shopping carts. I’m not giving up waterfalls and sunsets for parking garages. But it does make me wonder how many photographs I’ve missed simply because I’d already decided there was nothing there worth seeing.
A photographer can become very efficient at doing that.
We walk into a place and start sorting almost immediately. Good light. Bad light. Interesting subject. Distracting background. Nothing here. Keep moving.
Most of the time, those decisions help us. We can’t photograph everything, and we shouldn’t try. Part of becoming better with a camera is learning to be selective.
But maybe we can become too selective.
An ordinary subject can change completely when the light changes. A row of shopping carts in the middle of the afternoon may look like nothing more than a row of shopping carts. Put those same carts under a parking lot light late at night, with long shadows stretching across wet pavement, and now I might stop.
A hospital hallway may seem dull until sunlight starts coming through a doorway and creates shapes across the floor. Rain on a store window can distort people, signs, and lights outside until something familiar looks completely different. Utility lines that usually seem like clutter can form patterns against a clear sky.
The object didn’t change.
The way I looked at it did.
I’ve also started thinking about how much photography is tied to destinations. I go somewhere because I already know what I want to photograph.
If I go to a waterfall, I’m looking for the waterfall. If I visit an old town, I’m thinking about the buildings. If I see the sky beginning to light up toward evening, I start thinking about where I can get a good view of the sunset.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I enjoy those subjects, and I’m certainly not giving them up.
But what about everything between where I started and where I was going?
How many times have I driven past something interesting because I was trying to get to the “good” location? How many times have I walked through a parking lot, down a hallway, along a sidewalk, or through a building without really looking because my attention was already fixed on something farther ahead?
That might be an interesting photography exercise all by itself.
Go somewhere familiar and refuse to photograph the obvious thing.
If everyone is looking toward the sunset, turn around.
If there’s a grand old building in front of you, look at the worn steps, the reflections in the windows, the doorway, the signs, or the small details that most people pass without noticing.
If you’re standing somewhere with a beautiful view, look down.
That last one sounds almost silly, but how often do we actually do it?
Maybe there’s an old leaf caught in a crack in the pavement. Maybe footprints are crossing through fresh snow. Maybe the light is bouncing off a puddle in a way that makes the reflection more interesting than whatever is above it.
The point isn’t to force myself to make a good photograph out of everything I see. Some things really are boring. I could stare at them for half an hour and still decide there’s no photograph there.
That’s fine.
The real purpose would be to interrupt the habit of deciding too quickly.
When I first became interested in photography, I was willing to try almost anything because I didn’t yet know what my favorite subjects would be. I experimented. I made plenty of photographs that didn’t work. I pointed the camera at things simply because I wanted to see what they’d look like as photographs.
Over the years, that changes.
Experience teaches us what works. We become more confident. We know what we like, and naturally we start looking for more of it.
There’s a good side to that. It helps develop the way we see and the kind of photographs we make.
But I don’t want experience to make my world smaller.
I still want to be surprised.
I want to look at something I’ve passed a hundred times and suddenly wonder why I never noticed it before. I want to come home occasionally with a photograph I never expected to make when I walked out the door.
And I think this reaches beyond photography.
All of us become accustomed to our surroundings. We stop noticing the buildings we drive past every day. We quit looking closely at the rooms we spend the most time in. We become so familiar with certain places that we barely see them anymore.
A camera can be a good excuse to change that.
It gives me a reason to stop for a few seconds and look again.
Maybe I still won’t take the photograph. Maybe I’ll decide the shopping cart really is just a shopping cart.
But every once in a while, I may find something there that I would’ve missed before.
Maybe getting out of a photographic rut doesn’t always require buying another lens, traveling somewhere new, or finding a spectacular subject.
Sometimes I may just need to stop looking so hard for the things I already know I like.
The next photograph could be in a parking lot, at the end of a hallway, beside the road, outside a grocery store, or sitting quietly in a corner I’ve walked past countless times.
The interesting part is realizing that it may have been there the whole time.
I was simply looking somewhere else.
