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Photography: Creating Meaningful Photographs

Beginner photographers looking for subjects to photograph often make the mistake of thinking that photography is somehow a documentary process. Look I saw X. Here is a Y. There was a Z.

To take your photography to the next level, one needs to begin to use one’s photography to capture more than objects. Create feelings, moods, suggest ideas and concepts. Make a commentary on the world. Create a personal vantage point or position. Just don’t think of capturing objects in a straight forward, snap shot perspective. Give your photography a unique voice.

Look what William Eggleston managed to capture in this photo of a tricycle. The American Dream summed up in a single photograph. Foreground and background carefully considered. It’s not a photograph of a tricycle but a photograph of life in suburbia. When you start moving beyond capturing objects and start capturing concepts, the magic happens.

William Eggleston's Big Wheels. This enigmatic 1970 portrait of a tricycle took photography down a whole new road
William Eggleston’s Big Wheels. This enigmatic 1970 portrait of a tricycle took photography down a whole new road

The importance of scale – Eggleston carefully uses scale in the Tricycle photograph. Using a worm’s eye view he emphases the size of the tricycle, making it larger than the suburban tract house beyond. Perhaps indicating the importance of childhood or the child’s view point in which his or her trusty tricycle is the most important thing in their world. Scale is an important tool of the photographer as photography shows us the world though a lens which is different than the way we see with our eyes and brain.