I think I’m developing a new aspect of my photographic style.

It’s not “everything sharp”. It’s not a close-up detail with blurred background either.

Motive sharp, everything else gone

Everything sharp

Those two used to be my mainstays; now, I’m doing something that’s a detail of the wider scene, sometimes sharp, and sometimes with the planes separated by depth of field or geometry.

Basically, instead of a berry or an insect or a bird isolated by the depth of field, I separate a piece of the scenery. You’d expect me to do it with a longer focal length, but I sometimes do it with an ultrawide, too.

I started doing it more than a year ago, and I’m noticing it just now; I went through my recent photos and they didn’t look like my typical stuff, and I asked myself why.

They still have the same atmosphere like my other stuff, though. It’s just that the technical and compositional aspect seems to have evolved.

I think I developed this technique because I stopped giving a shit about what anyone online would think. You see, it’s actually hard to learn new things if you maintain an online presence, because people like seeing the stuff you’re doing well, and they don’t like seeing the transitional stuff that’s not necessarily good – or, more accurately, it’s bad by necessity, because you’re learning, and when you’re learning you’re not getting everything right. So, you kind of tend to produce more of the stuff you’re good at, in order to avoid criticism, and by doing so you don’t improve. You learn how to insulate yourself against criticism online very quickly; basically, you check your work for things someone might object to, and you post the most polished versions of the stuff that got you the most praise. There were a few years when I tended to do that. It actually improved my technique; I learned how to get perfect sharpness when things needed to be perfectly sharp, and how to get perfect blur when they needed to be blurred out. However, it had a drawback – I stopped taking pictures I felt were good, when I knew people wouldn’t get the point quickly enough. I stopped taking specific atmospheric shots that were not compositionally obvious enough for the online audience. However, at some point, I stopped giving a shit to the point where I am now revisiting those things, the aspects of photography where I never practiced enough to get really good at them because I knew other stuff would be better received.

I also shoot more black&white now, and I tend to include humans and their artefacts in the pictures more, instead of trying to create an impression of untouched nature. It’s not that I never did that before, but I usually avoided it. I now treat humans like bugs or squirrels – they just happen to be there, as parts of the scenery.

It’s not that I abandoned my old forms – I still do “everything sharp, no human presence, pure nature, wide scenery” pictures, as well as my standard closeup portraits of tiny things. It’s just that I also do the things in between.