How to Take Better Photos in Boring Places

0:00 There is no such thing as a boring place to photograph. The truth is, you just haven't learned what to look for yet. And for every photographer, these things that they look for may be different. For me, I personally have three things that I look for to turn a boring environment into an interesting photo. Before I share those with you, I wanted to thank today's video sponsor, Squarespace. I've actually been using Squarespace for over 10 years now. Their templates and easy to use drag and drop interface make it incredibly simple to create and maintain a professionallook website that adapts to any device, mobile or PC, without any coding experience necessary. My Squarespace website was an essential part of how I built my photography business. It allowed me to showcase my

0:46 photos on a portfolio, share recent work on my blog, and then also receive inquiries from potential clients through my contact form. If you're one of those photographers relying on just your Instagram profile as a sole place to share your work and build your photography business, I would really consider making a website on Squarespace. You can visit squarespace.com/rabaleros to start a free 14-day trial and get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. The first thing that I look for is light. And I don't necessarily mean like looking for good lighting for a subject that you have in mind, but instead I mean looking for the source of light in a space and making that light like the subject of the photo. To do this, I expose for the brightest part of the scene. This is often called exposing for the

1:32 highlights. And some people do this in order to really save all the dynamic range in the photo and bring the shadows up, but that's not my approach. So when I expose for the highlights, that's usually to make the shadows go darker. And for me, that's the point. Instead of trying to save every detail, I'm using the light as the focal point of the image. This is going to create something that's a little bit more moodier, contrastier, and it gives really strong graphical shapes in the composition. And anything that that light reflects off of can also serve as a secondary compositional element to draw you into the scene or to the focal point. And as you learn how to find these types of scenarios and expose them for the highlights, it's an easy step to level it up and start incorporating silhouettes into the composition just to take it a little bit further. My

2:18 personal favorite thing to look for is shapes. Some of these shapes are very obvious structures in the environment like a a door as a rectangle compositional element. But more often than not, these shapes come from the force perspective that happens when you have a camera compressing a 3D scene, a 3D world into a 2D flat photo. Personally, my favorite shapes to look for are triangles. This is a photo of a stairwell in a parking garage. I was loading up luggage into our car preparing to head back home from a family trip, and I spotted this scene as I was going down the stairwell. It was literally like triangle heaven for somebody whose favorite shapes are triangles. There are at least like five triangles in total. So like in this one section, we have like two combined triangles and then we have another

3:03 triangle created with the stairs and with the wall that's the side of another stair. And then because you cut off the corners with a rectangular aspect ratio of the photo itself, that creates additional triangles. And by being able to look for shapes in just the natural world, I've realized that sometimes the photo isn't about like the object in the frame or the specific obvious subject. In this case, the subject or the object is a a stairwell. It's more about how the shapes in the frame work together to transform into something else visually that is interesting to you. And the last thing that stands out is color. I think that color can make an ordinary scene feel a bit more designed or intentional. And I think that's because a lot of

3:48 commercial spaces like hotels and restaurants and parking structures already use color intentionally. So let's take for example complimentary colors like these benches in this walkway. The colors already probably chosen to work well together because it's a a hotel walkway. So blue and orange and these are complimentary colors. And for me, it's my job as a photographer to just recognize that those colors are there, highlight its prominence, highlight the orange, and then build a composition around it. So for me, I wanted to create a minimal composition just so that the color stands out, give it some proper spacing from the top and bottom to kind of make it make sense for the viewer and then balance those benches with something on the right in order to give a sense of like harmony. And I use this plant on the right hand side. And in other times,

4:34 I'm looking for just simple blocks of color that can help organize the frame. So, here we have this light and shadow um falling on a stairway rail. And when you combine the light and shadow with the color, the color adds another set of lines that breaks up the scene into smaller shapes. And when you have more shapes, it kind of makes the photo more digestible to the viewer. I know this type of thinking is a little bit more abstract, but I think being able to turn a boring scene, like a traditionally boring scene, into something interesting requires that abstract thinking. And honestly, one could say that is actually just the definition of the process of creating art. Ultimately, the goal of this video is not for me to tell you specifically what you have to look for. They're just the things that I look for.

5:20 There is no right or wrong way to do this. I'm not trying to make photography feel like this like rigid thing like like school or something academic. What I am trying to do is show you what I find interesting in the world and kind of tie that to like an actual POV behind-the-scenes like real world scene and then show you how I translate that into a photograph that feels compelling to me and hopefully maybe a little bit interesting to you. And my hope is that by sharing this process, you start to learn what you find interesting. And then from there, you can learn techniques either from me or from other photographers on YouTube or even maybe techniques that you learn on yourself just through practice and repetition that help you create photos that are aligned with your own taste and your own perspective. Because at the end of the day, photography isn't about making

6:06 photos the correct way. There is no right or wrong way. There is just your way. All right, that's it.