Stop Taking Pictures. Start Taking Photos.

Facts

I’m standing at the Australian coast, looking out onto a breathtaking sunset. I pull out my phone and take a picture:

I look down at my phone, puzzled — it was as if I had destroyed something beautiful. It’s an OK picture, but nothing compared to the sunset that was right in front of me. The image on other side of the camera did not tell the same story…something happened when I tried to put a border on what I was seeing.

I hear my mom:

“Ug. I wish they didn’t put that ugly house right there!”

I look to the left and see a lone building sitting on top of a dock that’s jutting out into the sea. She had a point. The house did take away from the otherwise entirely natural view. On the other hand, the so-called docked-atrocity would probably make for a better picture. I walk over, camera in hand:

The Ugly Dockling made for a pretty alright photo. I’m surrounded by a seaside sunset over the distant islands, and this eyesore turns out to be my favorite photo. Herein lies the difficulty of photography: just because something looks good in person doesn’t mean it makes a good photo.

As a hobbyist photographer, this can be very frustrating. To better come to grips with this, I’ve created a personal distinction between a picture and a photo.

Now, in the traditional sense, a “picture” and a “photo” mean pretty much the same thing. To me, these two words illustrate the difference between the first and second image above. Taking a picture is seeing something with your eyes and capturing that moment with a camera. Taking a photo acknowledges the difference between being somewhere and seeing somewhere. Taking a photo is understanding that our fully immersive experience has no direct mapping to a 13" computer screen.

This is not to say there is anything wrong with taking pictures. I love taking pictures for the sake of telling stories. But, these same stories are told more effectively when we admit the difference between the images from a camera and the experiences themselves.
Here I present the five things I try to keep in mind when I’m taking photos. These are not hard and fast rules, but advice to myself so that I can better tell the story of a beautiful sunset even on the other side of a camera.

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