Why Good Photos aren’t Great.

[Music] [Music] a big thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this week's video if you need a website or a domain go to squarespace.com sljames for 10% off your first purchase hello everybody and welcome to what you might be able to see is Peak Autumn here in Wales uh I've got to be careful not to get run over on this road but um today is basically the last day of autumn for me not officially but I don't think I'm going to have chance to get out past today because I've got lots of commitments and I'm going away next week so um yeah basically I need to make today count uh I've parked up back the there because I thought I saw an opportunity for a photo here but I might be wrong we'll soon find out yeah immediately got wet feet never mind uh well I think you could make a pretty solid argument that what I'm choosing to photograph first today is probably the least conventionally beautiful scene in I don't know a 3 m radius lots of people would think that this bridge and this road sign actually uh make the scene worse but I don't know I find it super interesting and I think I've banged on an awful lot recently about this human nature thing this balance between wanting human-made stuff and nature in my scene fused together because for me at least I find it super interesting but uh this is another very good example of it so here I am I I uh I really love if I stand just a bit to the left so over here somewhere the um the sign Ed or you can frame up so that the sign kind of points toward the foliage and the yellow edge of the sign Works quite nicely with the leaves too there's something quite pleasing about that I think right I've actually been here an embarrassingly long amount of time now so uh it's a nice scene but let's move on oh the color I don't think I've ever been here for Peak Autumn before look at that oh back here you can just get those trees right at the top that looks pretty good well they take a guess at the idiot who forgot to bring his polarizer and it started to rain perfect polarizer [Music] [Music] conditions I don't find myself in the best place to uh shoot a rainbow currently nice [Music] though there it goes what a job that must be uh well welcome to the part of the video that I feature every week now where I talk about why I'm sat at my desk and not still out taking photos and usually it's because of a mistake I've made all the weather all the fact I didn't take enough batteries or my Hunger but this week it was um yeah the sun came out which I didn't really like even with a rainbow and I was thinking all the way home in the car why is it that I wasn't particularly fussed about staying out um even though I'm sure there were probably still some good photos on offer like the rainbow and boyed by the fact that some of you are very kindly recently mentioned that you quite like the the introspective nature of this channel I thought I'd indulge in that thought for a few minutes and I like I said I was thinking all the way home why it is that I felt not particularly fussed about staying out today and why really I felt quite flat about Autumn this year on the whole and typically like for lots of photographers I love autumn but this year meh anyway I think I've worked it out over the past one 2 three years years something like that I've noticed that the photographers and the photography I'm drawn to most has a particular flavor to it and that flavor is basically stuff that's shot in otherwise unremarkable places but thanks to the photographer's skill has been made to look remarkable and I say thanks to the photographer's skill this stuff that I'm talking about typically doesn't have a huge photographers footprint on it and what I mean by that and I'll show you some of the work that I'm referencing now what I mean by is that they haven't leaned on super shallow depth of field or crazy color or mad lighting effects or wacky focal lengths these are people that have used incredible skills in observation to make unremarkable things look remarkable and yes over the past however long I've noticed that I've been more and more drawn to photography like that versus Autumn photography or or Honeypot location photography or photos taken anywhere where you or anyone else might Rock up and say that's a nice photo and I think the reason for it is that I have the same reaction to that kind of imagery that I do to uh watching the first week of Wimbledon you know if you're watching like jovic or federa or Nadal or any sports person or sports team to be honest who are like at the top of their game and that's all well and good watching like the creme creme but when they're playing someone who isn't it's not that compelling and the reason it's not that compelling I think is because there's no there's no element of surprise and it's much the same if I see autumn photos full of color I think that is nice but I'm not surprised that that looks nice so I'll look at it once but I won't feel compelled to return to it also an apology to the photographers that I'm featuring here I should have been organized enough to reach out to them to get some high reses files but I wasn't and therefore I've just taken some screenshots from Instagram so uh to see their work properly links in the description um to all of the ones I've I've featured but nowadays looking at other people's work and thinking about my own work I'm trying more and more to um focus my time on on unremarkable places and trying to make them look in some way remarkable I would say is is my aim and I don't think I'm particularly good at it but I'm infinitely inspired by the people who are yeah so in short that's that's why I wasn't too fussed about hanging around to to try and take photos of a rainbow I honestly don't think I'd have thoughts like this if it wasn't for this channel but by way of having to make photography videos every week pretty much I um I invariably have to think more about photography than I I probably would otherwise which I quite like so yes this is probably a theme that you'll notice more and more of on this channel a this human nature thing that I'm always talking about but B you might also notice me taking photos in places where you think but why on Earth is he trying to take a photo there that's this is why anyway I hope that makes some kind of sense and big hypocrite warning uh I am very very fortunate to get to travel to places like Antarctica and the Arctic which are obviously not everyday kind of places very much Honey Pot locations if they're easier to get to but for everyday stuff I find myself more and more compelled to places that on the surface at least are are less compelling yeah also on the subject of Antarctica and the Arctic some places have become available so if you're interested in those trips links in the description done a great job of selling that haven't I uh hello me again just two hours older uh I thought it made sense when I was editing this video to um include a couple of examples of what I mean by good versus great photos because of this element of surprise and I'm using my own photos here and calling one of them good one of them great obviously this is just my opinion you may think they're both awful and you'd be entitled to do so but this photo I think is a pretty nice shot I think it's a good photo I think it's well composed it's sharp I think I've exposed well because the surrounding atmosphere doesn't distract from the subject which is these mountains in a really nice wispy atmosphere I really like it but I think it's only a good photo a photo I think is great and again just my opinion you may think it's awful but uh I really really like this purely because there's an element of surprise in the shape of this derel Hut now there's nothing I've done technically any better than the previous photo but this is a photo that I would continually return to purely as I say because of this element of surprise and increasingly as time goes on that is what I'm looking for in my images and that's why this photo is the only photo uh in my print store at the moment um yes anyway hopefully that was interesting and uh big thank you for watching and also a huge thank you to the sponsor of this week's video Squarespace and also while I'm talking about Squarespace actually the uh the print this this current print that I'm selling has got a couple of weeks left to run there are some copies still available uh and if you don't know basically I announced a couple of weeks back I I'm going to be selling one print at a time from now on and once it's gone I.E after a month or if it sells out it's gone I'll never sell it again so uh just a way to um to get something a bit more unique than something been on my website until the end of time so yes if you're interested in a print of that shot of Greenland then uh it's available for a couple more weeks also I've managed something that I don't think I've ever managed before a newsletter two months in a row which I shouldn't be that proud of given how easy it is to put a newsletter together with Squarespace uh you can basically copy templates from previous months there's lots of drag and drop like there is across all of Squarespace and it's very simple even for someone like me to make a newsletter look professional then a website look professional even though I have absolutely no skills in that realm and I think as I've said a few times before one of the best tools I think you can have as a photographer is a website and I can't recommend Squarespace enough for that whether it's for a portfolio an online store somewhere to send newsletters from or a Blog perhaps all of the above Squarespace does fantastically and I use the template Wells have done for years I love it so honestly if you've heard me say this kind of stuff before about Squarespace but you've never found the time to take the plunge just check it out you can go to squarespace.com for a free trial and after that if you'd like to make a purchase just go to squarespace.com sljames and you'll get 10% off that first purchase so a big thank you to squ space they continued support this channel uh and to you for watching my blabber Rings hopefully this one made sense hopefully they all make sense really uh next week I'll be going back in time a couple of months to show you a video I shot in September and all will be explained then

Channel: James Popsys

Views: 238,073

Keywords: wales, autumn, James popsys, photography

Id: VtBUbEUVJoI

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023