For me to decide whether a photo is awesome, good, not bad, bad, or awful, is simply by looking at it in few seconds / minutes, and If I can get a strong feeling (based on my guts) from that photo, or makes me want to asking questions to the photographer about that photo, then it is a great photo. Same happen with the way I select my photos, if I look at them, and these images able to inspire me to telling stories to other people, then they are good photos.
“Telling stories” in this context is not only understand the meaning from moments that happened inside photos, but also inspire me to telling more stories / questions to others, like:
- What makes this photo is interesting to me?
- The way I capture it, why this photo looks powerful to me?
- How come these moments ever happened? What an coincidence it is.
- What the subject was actually doing that time?
- How come from random moments able to create such beautiful colours match?
In fact, the very first reason I create this blog is because I want to share to other people about the way I look at photography itself. How I build my philosophy, how I get the inspirations, how I see the world through viewfinder, how I perceive the world and how I capture a scene that happen in decisive moment. Just like happiness, it feels good only when we share it to others, not to keep it all to ourselves.
I also believe the reason why I have special attraction to silhouette and shadow objects is because I like photos that can create questions to myself. Silhouette and shadow never give me any clear information about the subjects, therefore I need to infuse reality with my imagination when I want to interpret the story inside. Like the photo above, why the man look down? What women behind him want to do? Call him? Or actually they were just two strangers that did not know each other but I managed to capture them in one frame by coincidence? And by the way, what is that dark frame around them? Is it a big L-shape wall? Or just a window frame?
For second example, even though this is not silhouette or shadow, but his facial expression also give me some questions like: Why he looked so happy feeding pigeons? Why he loves birds? And actually what he was doing for living? Why was he feeding birds in the middle of daylight instead of working on something?
The interesting part, I do not think I am a big fan of painting, but every time I see someone’s painting that I like, I feel it tries to talk to me, not always about tell stories or give particular meaning, but also have questions that I do not think I will ever know the answer. What is the philosophy of this shape? How the artist decide to use this colour combination? How long until he/she get inspiration to create this piece of art? These questions actually are things that make me want to telling stories about an image to other people.
This fact makes me think that to decide if I like an art form or not (drawing, sculpture, music, photography, etc) this thing should be able to talk to me instead of just show beautiful looks or shape or colours without create some stories / questions to tell. So, next time any of us wondering either our photos are good or not, then maybe we can start to let the photos talk to us. If it make us excited to tell stories about this photo to other people (the philosophy, the way to capture it, the unique things, etc) then I think we just found a good image that we really like personally.
That is all about how photos give me inspiration to tell stories, even though I do not know clearly what happened in reality when that moment captured. Street photography is a form of art, and my personal opinion is in art we allow to create our own stories based on our visions. If we want to telling reality through our photos, we should pursue documentary photography instead. Until next time 🙂
Keep shooting and stay inspired,
Nico Harold