Years from now, you won’t care about your version of the shot everyone else has. You’ll care about the one only you could take.
Every photographer knows the drill. You return from a trip, start copying photos from your memory cards, pour a coffee, and begin culling your images. Or some variation of that. And somewhere in that process, something strange begins to happen.
The photos you actually traveled to take – the ones that required you to arrive early to get a spot for your tripod – get a quick look, maybe even an edit, and then a shrug before you move on.
Meanwhile, a spontaneous shot of your friends pretending to do a fashion shoot in France gets exported and shared.
I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize the pattern, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.
The pull of iconic places
There’s a gravitational force to photograph famous places. You’re standing above Machu Picchu at sunrise, or below the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, and it feels almost negligent not to take a great photo of it. That’s the draw. It’s why you’re there. And it’s why there are often several hundred other people with cameras right next to you, trying to do the same thing.
I’m not suggesting you skip these photos, but before you spend half a day of your valuable travel time on one of them, it’s worth asking a simple question: Why am I doing this?
Sometimes, the answer is genuinely good. Maybe you’ve been thinking about how to photograph the place for years and have a real vision for it – a unique angle or treatment that’s different from what everyone else has done. There are always new ways to photograph something that’s already been photographed a million times, and if you’re the person with that vision, that’s a gift. Go for it.
There’s a gravitational force to photograph famous places.
More often than not, however, the answer is that it’s an exercise. Photography is a craft and a skill, and one that requires repetition. Some of the most useful photos I’ve ever taken were mediocre pictures of famous things, because the mistakes I made taking them taught me something I later used.
And occasionally, you really do just get lucky. You’re standing somewhere right when the weather or the light does something extraordinary, and if you’re ready, you capture something rare. Luck, as the saying goes, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Taking a lot of unremarkable photos of iconic places is the kind of preparation that leaves you ready to act when that chance alignment of magic factors finally happens.
But sometimes, the honest answer is just that “you’re there,” and you feel like you should photograph whatever the thing is. That’s the one worth examining, because if the result is going to be identical to several million photos already on the internet, you’ve spent something valuable – your time on a trip you might never repeat – to produce a duplicate.
Then, there’s a middle path, and one I find myself embracing more often: if you’re going to shoot the icon, do something to personalize it and make it yours. Put someone you’re traveling with in the frame, or find something in the foreground that creates a humorous juxtaposition. It won’t be fine art, and it probably won’t win any awards. But then again, was your technically perfect shot going to win any in the first place?
The photos that matter
There’s a truism about travel stories: Nobody ever goes to a dinner party and tells stories about what went right on a trip.
The stories that land, and the ones people actually listen to rather than finding an excuse to return to the buffet for another piece of shrimp cocktail, are the ones where things went sideways. The trip where you went to one country, but your luggage went to another. The “hotel with a view” whose view turned out to be an alley full of dumpsters. Or the food poisoning that arrived courtesy of a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Nobody ever goes to a dinner party and tells stories about what went right on a trip.
Photography works the same way. The frames that survive for years and decades are almost never the postcard-perfect shots. They’re the small vignettes, like a spontaneous photo with friends in a French village or the street vendor in Buenos Aires where you had the best food of your entire adventure.
When I was younger, I came home from a lot of trips with a lot of photos of famous things. Some were pretty good. A lot more were pretty mediocre. But what I learned pretty quickly was that, regardless of how good they were, other people were rarely that interested in looking at those photos.
What they did respond to were the candid, unstructured, and often just plain weird photos that captured the essence of the trip. Years later, those were the ones I cared about too.
So, shoot the icon if you want to shoot the icon. Just don’t let it take over your trip. Keep your camera ready during the in-between moments, the ones that don’t feel important when they’re happening. Odds are good that one of them is the photograph you’ll still be looking at in twenty years.
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