Dubai is Not Venice
How can a photographer find inspiration regardless of the place where he lives in? It is easy to think that the environment shapes our photography and, actually, this is the truth most of the times! Photographers from the beautiful Tuscany, Italy, are well known around the world for their wonderful panoramas. Not only that: if you are lucky enough to become friends with one of them, they might even tell you some of their secrets on how to capture the perfect picture, what lens to use or which place and what time is just the right one.
Being away from wonderful panoramas is what happened to me when we decided to leave Italy almost 3 years ago. I wanted this event and all the related stress not to stop me from taking pictures.Here below the 3 tricks that I tried myself to find everywhere and anyhow a reason not to stop shooting:
- Go out and shoot every day for 1 year. Practice makes perfect and this one is rule number 1: I kept a camera always with me and dedicated some time every day to photography. I forced myself to a daily click regardless of the theme. Everything became my Daily Picture Project.
- Shoot with a Prime lens. Using a Prime lens instead of a zoom and sticking to it consistently had at least two positive effects: I ended up mastering that lens and I gained consistency in my portfolio. Mastering a lens means to know so well how things look like when using that lens that I could see the final picture even before taking the camera out.
- Find one or more theme and work them out. I found some themes that I wanted to develop and I forced myself to look for pictures matching the themes. For example I wanted to describe the life of Expats in Saudi Arabia, describe how certain segregation concepts work here (male, female, family, singles etc...). This helped me to be always in 'search mode' while out in the street and, eventually, I ended up with over 2500 selected pictures, many of them falling into one of the desired themes. Having a portfolio already set up according to themes gives to my work a purpose and a deeper breath.
