Have you tried photographing common subjects with a different audience in mind?
Think about this: Wherein lies the fun of subjecting all those folks who come to visit you with those old movies about the family, or your last travel to Timbuktu, etc? You and your family may have seen these countless times, but… there is always fun and excitement in showing it to a new audience! Why? Because you get a chance to relive those moments, but also because there is a joy and fun in watching the images and/or movies through somebody else’s eyes. Well, we can at least try to do so.
The important thing however is that such a move, trying to see something through another’s eyes, can be quite productive for our photography. Starting with that notion in mind, we can take shots of things that are quite familiar to us, but change our perspective on them when we imagine showing them to a different audience.
So, take a moment to consider who your viewers might be, and how that might influence the way you look deeply at your subject. Does that open up different ways of thinking about the moment? About your subject? About the experience? About your viewers? About your processing?
This might seem like adding yet another thing to remember to your already overcrowded photographer mind, but in truth it is merely reorganizing something that as good photographers we already do: considering our viewers. The change here lies with putting viewers and that experience earlier in our photographic imagination. Much too often, the dimension of viewing, as well as viewers, end up at the end of the process (as in the end of an assembly line process of photographic production). Reorganizing our process so that such insights about viewers, can be earlier in our creative process activates a mindful attitude, and might yield surprising results.
