Blog

Is there a point to photography, or should there be one? We’re going to assume there is, otherwise this will be a short post!

I’m not going to be talking about commercial photography in this article, some people make a living out of photography, and aside from any other reason they do it, that alone gives it a point and purpose. I’m including people who make record photography in this too – that’s another very specific reason to capture an image.

I think the vast majority of us take photos as a way of recording events in our lives, so we can look back on them and remember them, and that’s definitely one reason to create photos. But I’m not really talking about that either.

I want to focus on what the point of photography is when it comes to capturing images as art, or as a hobby. Whether that’s landscapes, wildlife, portraits, street or anything else.

Here’s an image I captured on the first morning of our weekend in the lake district. It’s during golden hour and was captured literally from our campsite. As you can see, it’s quite cloudy, but there are enough breaks in the clouds to let some amazing light through onto the hills there. I liked the dark moody atmosphere, so I have purposefully kept it quite dark and contrasty in the edit.

Photography has obviously changed a lot over the years. Back in the early days of photography daguerreotypes were a way for the middle classes to capture self portraits without the cost of a commissioned painting, and this was a way of showing social status. Cameras started to become more affordable and more widely used by the general public in the early 1900s, and so over the years, the reasons to capture images changed. As well as being able to capture everyday moments for nostalgia, people were also able to create their own art, if they chose to do so.

With the invention of digital photography and then smartphones, almost everyone has a camera with them at all times, and according to Google, over 5 billion photographs are taken every single day! But is there a difference in just pointing your camera at a scene and taking a snap compared to planning the shot, carefully choosing a location, setting up your composition and waiting for the right light and conditions? It’s obviously two different processes, but should we judge the outcomes differently?

Here’s a shot I got from the boat jetties at Derwent Water, looking out at Derwent Isle. There wasn’t a whole lot of planning involved, it was the middle of the day, although fairly overcast, so that helped. We had gone for a walk, and I just spotted the scene as we passed. It was raining, so I needed to be fairly quick. Compositionally, I think it’s a nice shot, and it would be good to come back to when the light is a bit more dynamic.

Zooming into 150mm, I got this shot. The boat is a little bit blurred, I probably needed a slightly faster shutter speed. But I still like the shot, particularly the light that came through and illuminated the trees on the right.

I think the point of photography is different for everyone. For some people it’s the documentation process. There are some who have a knack for looking at the chaos of the world, in a street scene, for example, and distilling it into a single image that says something about that particular time, place or event. For some it can go very deep, and they may choose to photograph political or social themes as a way of highlighting or drawing attention to them. Others just like to tell a story, and an image is a very powerful and universal way of doing that.

This image was also captured at the jetties at Derwent water. I liked all the information in this one, with the boats on the shore and then the one at the jetty surrounded by the birds on the water, all surrounded by the fantastic landscape of the lake district. There was a lot going on here though and there wasn’t anything special going on with the light, and so I decided to simplify it by taking the colour out of the image.

So let’s go back to Friar’s Crag now. I was really hoping that despite the grey clouds and drizzly weather, I might have got some light shining through on the landscape. Sometimes those are the best conditions because you can get amazing colours alongside some real drama in the sky. But unfortunately the cloud never really broke and I was left with quite a dull, grey scene. I tried several different spots, to try and find a composition, going high and low with my tripod, and swapping between the 24-200mm lens and my 14-30mm. I eventually settled on a low angle, fairly wide and with the light swiftly receding, opted for a long exposure shot to try and add that ghostly effect to the water.

In the end, despite a fantastic landscape in front of me, the final image was probably one of the weaker shots of the weekend.

So why do I spend so much time doing all this? Trotting out to far flung locations in the evening, or getting up at 5am, to go out in the rain and come away with shots of a grey landscape? For me personally, there are 2 points to photography, or 2 reasons why I do it.

One is to capture the beauty of a scene, and share it with other people in a way that I want them to see it. I can manipulate how they see the image through how I compose the shot, how I use the camera to capture it and then how I edit it afterwards. My shot at Friar’s Crag might not have been exactly how I wanted it to be, but I was able to make something dark and moody that hopefully tells a story about what an early autumn evening in the lake district can look like.

The second reason is simply the process of going out, being in nature and taking it all in. I’ve definitely seen so many brilliant scenes and locations, that I might not otherwise have visited had it not been for photography. And it might sound cheesy, but being out early, and experiencing it all, seeing and hearing all the animals and smelling all the smells of the surrounding woods or fields, really makes you feel alive.

So I never regret going to capture an image, and I was rewarded the next morning anyway when we had a particularly colourful and dramatic sunrise. I headed out to a nearby field where I had seen a tractor trailer, and I used that as a bit of foreground interest to counterbalance the amazing sky and landscape.

Those are my thoughts on what the point of photography is. I think that although the end result is obviously very important, the process is at least as important if not more so. These days social media can trap you into wanting to share your images for likes. That’s all well and good – I like to share my images too, and having an outlet for the end product can really put the cherry on top of the whole process. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing it for the interaction and the likes or comments, and before you know it, you’re thinking more about the end result than the process of creating it. Not only is that cutting out one of the most rewarding parts of the process, but you end up with generic images that are geared towards getting the most interaction on social media.

So I think, don’t worry too much about the end result. Just enjoy the process, and you’ll inevitably get good results at some point. That’s the point of photography for me.

You can see this article in video format, below.

In this Podcast, the presenters talk about one of my recent videos on how AI tools can be used to augment your photos.

Okay, okay – this isn’t real. I also used AI to make this! But I thought it was so remarkable, I had to share it anyway.

You can see the video they are ‘discussing’ here:

When it comes to photography, the histogram is often considered an essential tool for achieving perfect exposure. However, I believe there’s a common misconception about how to use this tool effectively. In this post, we’ll explore why you might be using the histogram incorrectly and how, I think, it should actually be used to aid your photo editing.

What Is the Histogram?

You’ve likely seen the histogram on your camera’s screen or within your editing software like Lightroom. It’s a graph that represents the distribution of light and dark areas in your image. The left side of the histogram shows the darker areas (shadows), while the right side represents the lighter areas (highlights). The middle section is where midtones reside.
For simplicity, let’s consider a black and white image. In this case, the histogram might look like a mountain, with the peak indicating where most of the image data falls in terms of brightness. Many photographers assume that a well-exposed image should have a histogram with a nice, even hump in the middle. But that’s not always the case.