Just a reminder: Average means you're right in the middle. About half the folk are better than you, and the half are worse than you.
I was struck by a few of the results when I came upon the thanaverage Web site. In particular:
- 71% of participants think they are more perceptive than average.
- 58% of participants think they are more creative than average.
Perception and creativity are two crucial aspects to taking good photos.
You really have to perceive something in order to take a photo at all. Anyone standing in a certain area in Paris can perceive that that there's a very tall metal structure jutting up in the air. Most will take a photo of it (the Eiffel Tower, if you are one of those that 21% that think they're not smarter than average). Creativity after the perception is where great photos lie, though.
Galen Rowell used to often ask me about what I was feeling as we wandered landscapes together. The fact that we were using our feet to explore meant that we were almost certain to see (perceive) things that others wouldn't, as we were well off the beaten path most of the time. Even when we were exploring a beaten path, we weren't actually on the actual path all that much. "Perception" wasn't our problem.
Meanwhile, Galen's "feeling" question spoke to the creative process. If I felt something I was perceiving, the critical question was "how do I get those that view my resulting image to have that same feeling?" Often those feelings were clearly emotional, such as isolation, smallness, surrounded. When was the last time your photography instructor told you to capture a feeling or emotion like that?
I often I see students caught up in the "I perceive a thing" construct. They then proceed to point their camera at said thing and voila, press a button, and they're done. When they post those photos, I can pretty much guarantee that the viewer will quickly flick to the next one (or flick left!). Sitting in airports and planes I get a lot of time to watch people doom scrolling (yes, I snoop; I'm a curious guy). Flick, flick, flick, pause, flick, flick, flick.
Wait, what made them pause? Typically something they've never seen before (or perhaps not in this way), but more often than not I see they've stopped on an image that has a real story in it. It's not a photo of a thing, it's a photo containing a story in which the thing is a key player.
Perhaps it's all the filmmaking training I had early on that makes me go directly to story: films (and TV shows, and streamed shows) are pretty boring without a good story, right? Moreover, the director of photography—why isn't it director of filmmaking?—works hard with the director and actors to emphasize and embellish the story. For instance, they're more likely to light a drama in noir (dramatic lighting) than just turning on a bunch of big lighting panels.
Let me repeat something I've written before, there's a progression in photographic thinking: noun, adjective noun, adjective noun verb/adverb, complete sentence. Noun isn't much of a photo (elephant). Adjective noun is better (large elephant). Adjective noun verb starts to get interesting (large elephant trumpeting). Complete sentence or story is what I really want, though (large elephant trumpeting at predator making them uneasy). Curiously, the two extremes (noun and sentence/story) are the easiest to photograph: noun just means the thing needs to be in frame, while story means you have to show everything in the story. I'd argue that if the story isn't there, the photograph isn't there.
While I'd like you to come up with your own story, if you're just starting out on this journey into better photography, go ahead and cop a placeholder summary from Hollywood: adventure, drama, comedy, buddy, fantasy. When that elephant comes along, are you making an adventure, drama, comedy, buddy, or fantasy photo story?
The implication of the thanaverage results is that you're a perceptive, creative individual (okay, you're really just above average). My question to you is how is that showing up in your photos? Is it even showing up in your photos? What are you perceiving that others aren't, and how are you creatively tackling that to create a photo that's unique? If there's a photographer you admire, how are these two things showing up in their work?
Galen would travel to a new place with a bunch of pre-conceptualized stories based upon extensive research (fantasy photos that needed to be realized), but he also was very open to his perceptions when he was there, which always opened up entirely new stories. His best images were some of the former, some of latter. None were simply a noun.
If you made it this far, I'm going to suggest something outlandish, but instructive. Go to amazon.com. Search for "Dick and Jane level 1." There's a good chance if you're older as I am you encountered these books as a kid. Buy one. Take a close look at the illustrations. For instance, the book I'm looking at right now has a great potential photographic story from the get go in "Away we go." William S. Gray would have been a great photographer, and the vocabulary he was using was as basic as it gets, plus his sentences are tight and succinct. You don't need a huge vocabulary, incredible creativity, or pyscopathic perception to make an image do great work. But you have to tell a story, even a simple one.
You're above average. Now show it through your photography.
