“There’s nothing to photograph in my local area.”
We all know that to be a landscape photographer requires us to travel to dramatic destinations. Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Patagonia. Success in landscape photography so often comes down to who has access to the most spectacular scenery.
It’s so easy to dismiss what’s all around us. After all, doesn’t familiarity breed contempt?
But what if we’re looking at this all wrong?
What if success didn’t depend on finding interesting subjects, but on finding ways to make ordinary subjects more interesting?
The Trouble with Familiarity
Our curiosity is naturally piqued by the unfamiliar. New places seem chock-full of photographic potential, while those we encounter every day feel dull by comparison.
It’s easy to mistake novelty for interest. But they’re not the same thing.
Novelty triggers our attention instinctively. In unfamiliar surroundings, our senses are heightened. We become acutely aware of everything around us.
But in familiar surroundings, we relax. We stop paying attention to things we’ve seen a thousand times before. And with good reason. Imagine how exhausting life would be if everything demanded our attention.
The challenge, then, is learning how to switch our curiosity back on.
The Power of Why
Curiosity is simply the desire to understand something more deeply.
Much of our curiosity is triggered subconsciously, by the same primitive instincts that have helped humans survive for thousands of years. But that doesn’t mean we can’t stimulate it consciously.
And to do that, we need only deploy the most powerful word in the English language.
Why?
It’s the word that has driven countless scientific discoveries, challenged centuries of accepted wisdom and transformed our understanding of the world.
And it can transform how we see the world around us too.
What If?
That one word is enough to trigger our curiosity. But it’s not enough on it’s own.
Often, in the moment, the answers to the questions that drive our curiosity aren’t apparent. And so, we have to fill in the gaps for ourselves.
The human imagination is a powerful thing. It allows us to make sense of uncertainty by imagining possibilities that we can then explore through our photographs.
Whether we’re right or wrong is beside the point. A photograph that poses a question, suggests an answer and invites debate is inherently interesting.
All of a sudden, the ordinary has become something worth exploring.
We don’t need to travel halfway around the world to find interesting things to photograph.
What we need is a little curiosity, a willingness to explore and the imagination to see beyond what’s immediately apparent.
If you are looking for a way to discover the potential in your local area, try this.
Follow your curiosity, explore the overlooked, and use your imagination to reveal the potential.
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