It happens every day: Someone gets their first ‘real camera’ or has an epiphany about the fancy new smartphone they received, and they decide they will from this point forward be a photographer. Nothing wrong with that – photography is one of the greatest hobbies ever conceived. The problem isn’t even with the camera themselves, even if cheap DSLRs and smartphone cameras aren’t ideal for taking great photos.
No, the problem is with the clichés that every new photographer indulges in, creating images that just aren’t special enough to justify making them into canvas prints online or anything else. While some work in clichés is probably necessary just from an artistic development point of view, the world would be a better place if every newly-dubbed photographer would just skip past some of these all-too-common photo shoots.
Not Ready for Canvas Prints Online: The Sky
Lurking on every new photographer’s memory card or hard drive are approximately one billion photos of the sky. Interesting clouds, storms rolling in, perfect blue expanses of peace and tranquillity – trust us when we say it’s been done, and it’s been done hard. No matter how interesting the sky might seem to you, the world does not need one more photo of it.
Part of the problem is a lack of context or composition – the sky is just an expanse. There’s no there there. Compare photos of clouds to something like these interesting photos of buildings in the city. Notice how the sky is still there, but it’s been contextualised, given some composition – and not expected to carry the photo by itself.
Super Hi-Res Black and White Portraits
Black and White photography is always popular among newcomers to the art because it lends instant gravitas and power to otherwise mundane images. We’d like to encourage every beginning photographer to get past their black-and-white stage as quickly as possible, especially the part where they take super high resolution portraits of people – especially older folks with a lot of wrinkles and ‘character’ in their faces – and filter them to black and white.
There’s nothing wrong with taking some powerful portraits of loved ones, of course, but too often the whole super-detailed black-and-white thing is just a fad, because it instantly elevates your photos to something greater, when the fact is it’s all been done before – many times, and better.
It’s hard to tell a budding artist not to engage in cliché, of course, because in part that’s how we learn – by aping what’s come before, and picking the low-hanging fruit. Some of us will move past that and seek a challenge, and some are always happy to stay in cliché-land. But when it comes to photos that are worth turning into canvas prints online, you need to move past the cliché into something more unique.
When you’ve gotten past that opening phase and are doing some interesting stuff, click here and we’d be delighted to turn your art into stunning, affordable wall art.
