Where you live and what you photograph

Where you live and what you photograph

  • City dweller photographing mostly street

    Votes: 131 27.9%

  • Suburbs dweller photographing mostly street

    Votes: 52 11.1%

  • Countryside dweller photographing mostly street

    Votes: 16 3.4%

  • City dweller photographing mostly landscape

    Votes: 40 8.5%

  • Suburbs dweller photographing mostly landscape

    Votes: 47 10.0%

  • Countryside dweller photographing mostly landscape

    Votes: 39 8.3%

  • some other mix

    Votes: 144 30.7%
  • Total voters
    469
rodgersfoto said:
Look around your invironment. It is strong and demands to be photographed- for tomorrow it will change. You are in charge to record it. Take the photograph and live with it. The next moment will be different.
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Or on the other hand... No, it doesn't demand to be photographed, and I have no responsibility whatsoever for photographing it. I live in an extremely beautiful part of the world (rural France, la France profonde). Within 100 yards of my house I can be walking along the shores of a river, canalized from wetlands 800-1000 years ago. On the hill behind my house is the keep of a fortress begun in the early 11th century.

The things I am interested in do not change very fast; I'm not attracted to the growth and wilting of plants, and besides, after 8 years here, I have hundreds or (more likely) thousands of pictures of the village and similar villages nearby: you can see a few at http://www.rogerandfrances.com/sgallery/g france new.html. Every year I go back to Arles, http://www.rogerandfrances.com/subscription/arles 2010.html, but although I still get good pics there, I get fewer every year. I've photgraphed a lot of what I want to photograph there, and the main change is in the galleries.

As I said, it's temperament. Your temperament works differently, and you're lucky, but I don't think my approach is likely to change. It hasn't in the 44 years or so since I took up photography at the age of 16.

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Or on the other hand... No, it doesn't demand to be photographed, and I have no responsibility whatsoever for photographing it.
R.
Click to expand...

I'm with Roger on this. I don't feel any obligation to record images of my local surroundings. Recording your neighborhood before it changes is one approach to photography but it holds no interest for me.

I live in a place that is very unlike Roger's part of France. It's a prosperous, expanding modern American suburb. It's reasonably well planned and reasonably attractive, i.e., not a hodgepodge of strip malls and convenience stores. Change is rapid here. Find a vacant field and someone will soon come by to survey it for re-zoning. The most salient fact for photography is that the entire town looks pretty much the same because almost all of it was built in the last 25 years.

So, traveling somewhere, near or far, is a tonic to my eyes and my brain. On the one hand, new surroundings are an obvious visual novelty. On the other hand, as long as I don't allow the camera to lead me around by the nose, I've found that exploring for photo opportunities takes me deeper into a place and enhances the visit.
 
I live in San Francisco and I created a photoblog devoted to SF-Only pictures:

http://viewfindersf.aminus3.com/

San Francisco is photogenic and I try to include images of places, people, and things not normally seen by a typical tourist. I would call most of my shots "Cityscapes". I shoot street shots sometimes, it's not my primary focus and I'm not very good at it anyway 🙂.

--Warren
 
I guess I see a huge grey area between landscape and street. About 30% of my work is clearly landscape, 30% clearly street, 30% could go in either bin, and the remaining 10% is portraiture, still life, etc...
 
barnwulf said:
I live in Salt Lake City but I am only 1 mile from the entrance to Big Cottonwood Canyon. I can go to the city or be in the mountains in 3 -4 minutes. I used to shoot a lot of landscapes but now, I shoot mainly in the city in and around industrial areas. I love shooting in small towns as well. - Jim
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So you don't go skiing much? I've been over a few times for the skiing, but would be nice to make time concentrating on photographing the scenery. Stayed at the entrance to Little Cottonwood Canyon.

I live in a rural area, and don't have too many streets to take pictures of 😉 I like landscapes, but often with some sort of man-made element included.
 
I'm dreaming of a city/It was my own invention...

David Byrne (author of the above lyrics) and I live in the same city (New York), but I was born here. It's a hell of a huge, living, breathing, occasionally unruly canvas, which makes it anything but boring to my eyes, even after decades running around within it, camera in hand.

But, I do get beyond the City limits. Sometimes, to other cities: Tampa. Richmond. St. Louis. Houston. Philadelphia. Montreal. Paris (France, just to clarify).

And, places in between: an iron foundry outside Allentown (the car radio was tuned to a local station playing Billy Joel's "Allentown" for the very first time...eerie). A Boston & Maine railroad depot in Mechanicsville, NY. Watching the haze burn off the Blue Ridge Mountains. The post-hurricane calm of the beach in Galveston.

The point is, there's relatively little that doesn't interest me from a photographic standpoint in the absolute sense. It simply depends on the moment. Some things interest me more than others, but there's a lot that gets my attention. (Maybe giving up TV over 30 years ago did something weird to my brain?)

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the world to see, and photograph, before I die. I'll never get to all of it, and it's just as well. I'll never be bored.


- Barrett
 
I live in deep country in a tiny fishcamp on a navigable river. The light always is different from day to day, hour to hour, here in the Black Creek/Warrior River bottom. I see something new here every day. But I am apt to shoot anywhere I am ...
 
I live in a quite rural area, but shoot more in town than I do in the woods. Woods shooting is sure easier to get to, but my heart is in town when I've a camera in hand.

I've got current projects both in the woods and in town.
 
Rural city of about 2,200 in SE Texas. I'll shoot anything around here! Mostly rural and small. Not enough people on the streets for street photography unless there's a festival. But, I'm not a big fan of street, so no problem there.
 
I live in Cambridge, work in Boston, and while I used to shoot street all the time when I was in Philly, now I hardly shoot except at events and lately I've been into birds. I find Boston and Cambridge pretty uninspiring from a street/people/urban life perspective.
 
I live in Brooklyn, shoot all over NYC (and the world when I travel) but I really love street photography and teach street workshops here.
 
I live in Manhattan and photograph anything I think will make a good photograph that will please me... or a useful photo for any one of my numerous projects I'm working on.
 
I live in a suburb of Salt Lake City and I usually photograph around Salt Lake City and the suburbs. Various subjects that catch my eye that might make a nice photograph. - Jim
 
City dweller, and am drawn to urban landscapes, portraits (non-street), architecture and urban nightscapes. I have a growing interest in personal documentary images, which extends to my environment and thus street imagery, but am not sure if that is more down to living in a city, or just owning a rangefinder 🙂
 
None of the above...

While I live in the largest city in the county (30%+ of Monroe County's populartion lives in Key West) that is also the county seat, I live in a small town by most people's standards. It's too small to fit the urban/street photography description but, at the same time, definitely not at all like "suburban". The best description is what a neighbor down the street has on a sign on their porch, "I live where you vacation".

I'm 1/2 mile from the Gulf of Mexico and 1/2 mile from the Atlantic Ocean. I walk to work and can see the Atlantic for the last 2-3 blocks of the walk. A very short side trip on the way to work or home takes me to the beach.

I generally shoot "urban landscape" and a bit of "Caribbean island-style landscape" (beach, palms, and/or sea birds). It's more like what to some people would be "vacation photography" except for me it's 24/7/365.

http://dwg.happythursday.com/
 
I live in the first settlement established in the USA (Pensacola, Florida). A hurricane killed the first settlers, so the first US city is St. Augustine, Florida. It used to be an ultra-quiet city with no life in sign, so to speak. It still is not a noisy city. The sugar white beaches draw many tourists here.

I take photos of my family and the beaches.
 
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