Take pictures of your friends and family

As a photographer, sometimes you have to take pictures of people too

^ This is what my photos typically look like. I try to avoid people as much as I can to capture the scenery in it’s raw form. If you look at my Instagram, you will notice a severe lack of human beings in my pictures. This has been my approach to photography for years and I really didn’t see anything wrong with it until this Christmas.

In the past year I have been taking a liking to shooting film photos rather than digital. I took some time over the holidays at my parent’s house to look through their photo albums. I haven’t looked at them in a very long time (if ever) and I mostly wanted to see some film photos from the 90’s to see how they compared to my photos. And what I saw shifted my thinking about how I was taking photos.

Some of my favourite family photos from the albums

Every picture in theses photos albums, the photos that my parents cared enough to keep and put into an album, had people. Family mostly; babies, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, but also friends. It made me think about my photographs. I went to look through my camera roll and take a look at what photos I want to put into a photo album eventually. Quickly I realized that I don’t have any photos of my friends, like none at all. And only a few photos of my family.

Why do I avoid taking pictures of people? Especially people in my life. I’ve told myself in the past that I just take pictures of what I find interesting and I find people particularly interesting. But I think the actual answer is that, for me, taking pictures of people is just harder. Having to integrate them into the scene is always trickier than it should be or trying to pose them, that is terrifying. It is much easier to take a picture of an isolated scene.

But that’s an excuse really.

I like photography so much because I have a bad memory, really it is so bad. Looking at these photo albums has helped me realize that I don’t need to just remember the places that I’ve been, it’s also about the people that I’m there with.

So, I will be focusing more on taking pictures of my friends and family. I don’t want to say it’s a New Years Resolution because I don’t just want to do it for a year, I want this to be my default. I’m not going to try to avoid people in my photography anymore. Scenes don’t need to be empty to be beautiful.

I’m not sure if other people of thought about their photography this way. I’d love to know your thoughts about this!

Thank you for reading.

I wrote this while listening to this song.

Oh, and here are some pictures I’ve taken this year so far with this new way of thinking.