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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

You can know everything, and have all the right gear - but if you aren't interesting, or don't do interesting things, or don't find interesting people, you probably won't take good photos.

The hardest part about photography is what your photo is about. What is it saying, which can be different from the literal image, like how what a painting is about is often not exactly what is literally depicted

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Regarding "about", if you're doing photojournalism, there's a simple idea that I found tremendously helpful (as an amateur student): your image should tell a story.

There's a lot of technical stuff you need to internalize, and some visual sense, but, at the end of the day, your main goal is not something that looks appealing above the fold on the front page, but that communicates some important essence of the story.

Right, that makes perfect sense for photojournalsim; of course you also can have non-representational things such as abstract photography; whether you want to use the word 'story' for that too I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

I agree on "if you aren't interesting" but disagree on the things and people requirement.

I believe an interesting person can create interesting photos of almost anything.

I don’t think you have to be interesting but have an eye for interesting things. One way to do this is not to be “interesting” but to be “interested”.

On the other hand it certainly helps to do unusual stuff so you can take pictures not many people can take. For example there are pilots who post pictures from the cockpit. Hard to compete with that for most of us. Or even better be on the ISS.

nor will you make insightful articles for photographers to read...

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