Sick of shit

I've known about the existence of this particular community for quite some time, but as someone with a website, an instagram page, and a fistful of dollars earned from photography in the time I've drawn breath, I figured that I wanted to rant a little bit about the photographs that I see in other communities and what makes them shit.

Therefore, today, I went out into my garden to try and reproduce some of the "shit" photographs that I see, to try and understand why people post shit photography. Not photographs of shit, quite literally (though; that would be a funny line between decorum and standards) - but photographs which are technically and aesthetically unrefined and can be described as being of poor quality.

So, here's what I captured in my garden today. My garden is a small, nondescript parcel of land. I can stride from one end to the other in seconds. But it is dense, it is layered, and it is mine. In my garden, I have four chilli plants. This season, they've yielded about eight kilograms of chilli, which certainly isn't shit.

The image above, however, is shit. There's a leaf from the neighbour's grape vine that has drifted over the fence and landed on the ground cover that surrounds my mulberry tree. There's a few weeds coming through, but its better than mowing the grass.

I've made some intentional mistakes while capturing this image. You can see that I deliberately failed to apply the rule of thirds to that vine leaf, while doing something else good for the image.

What was the other something good?

Creating visual interest by using colour theory. The reddish hues of the leaf upon the green undergrowth are on opposing sides of the colour wheel, which colour science tells us should make a harmonious image.

I also didn't do any post processing to the image. The composition can be better. Or perhaps, I shouldn't have taken the image in the first place.

You see, I have a think for details. In my not shit photography, I aim to capture those details beautifully and viscerally, using cameras that I have to hold in both hands. Certainly, you can take a good photograph on a shit camera, and shit camera can't stop a good photographer. But the best camera in the world, won't not make your photographs shit.

The other reason my image was shit is because I was using the highest zoom setting on my phone. Here's the same setting, about a metre to the left. You'll see how the image is much sharper and has more detail, but its still a shit photograph.

On another note - do you know what the only difference between a good and a bad photographer is?

The difference between a good and shit photographer is what they show you.

This is a ceramic skull that I have in my garden. Its there as a decoration, because I have nowhere I can mount it near my front door where it won't get flogged or fall down and shatter in a breeze. Therefore, it gets a prideful placement among the ground cover, so that spiders, or bugs can use its hollow insides as a home or something.

Is it a good photograph? I definitely don't think so. So why am I showing it to you? With the hopes that you can look at these images and come to an understanding of why they're not good.

You can love photography or love music, or love singing, but it doesn't mean that you're going to be good at it. Photography isn't something that you can get better at by simply doing a lot of it. You need to look at the contextual history of photography, the way in which we interact with images.

You need to understand colour, composition, formalism, and a whole bunch of other boring shit to produce photographs that are consistently good. The thing is, you aren't just clicking a button or tapping a screen and capturing a masterpiece or a snapshot.

You need to be intentional about where you place things in your composition. You need to stop to consider the light. Consider the textures of things and how they interact with each other.

Consider being less shit.

It is what I think about every time I pick up the camera, or open the camera app on my phone to capture an image of my cat, a snapshot at a concert, or a whole bunch of other bits and pieces that I may find on my mobile phone's camera roll.

Not every photograph is a piece of art. Not every scribble on a napkin is, either. But thinking about art and the building blocks of photography is something that to me, is really fucking important, so here's me breaking the rule of photography, and sharing some really just.. shit photographs from my phone that were captured recently.

The Chilli Harvest. Notice how I put a rule in the shot for context? You can see the scale of the harvest. it is immense. But its a shit photograph. Its a document of my garden's output.

I will make hot sauce with them.

Then, here is my cat:

She's asleep, probably dreaming of food. The food I give her that she then chooses to ignore, until I pretend to take it away, then put it back down, much to her protests.

Then here's me with my sister in law in front of George Russel's F1 car. I clearly didn't even take the picture. Look at how exhausted we both look. Me, I probably had a fever at the time of this image, and I felt very much quite like shit for the week or so after this image was taken.

Then here's another shit photo of my garden. That's a chilli plant. The tree in the back is a mulberry. The ground cover has gone very growth happy since I took this photograph in MARCH.

But this is how it started. And for @riverflows you can now truly see how small my garden is. Pressure washer, or bark chips for scale. That image is now old, those chilli plants are about three times the size now, and the ground cover has almost all but covered the barkchips to keep the moisture locked in.

It needs some fertiliser soon, maybe tomorrow when I get back from the gym.

Anyway, I've rambled for almost a thousand words, which I can be very good at.

But remember, you can take shit photos, but you can also take better ones if you just pause to think about the important things that make a good photograph great. Light, composition, colour theory, sharpness, focus.

And also, not photographing the literal shit in your toilet bowl.

So to no one in particular - be better, and I will be too.