"What's your favourite subject?"

This was the first thing Anna asked me when I met her, stepping out of Zig's into a warm, humid night in Sudbury. The street was less stifling than the club, but the atmosphere was On us, clinging like our wet-from-dancing-too-much clothing.

In another context I would have answered "sex," but she was referring to my camera. Without hesitation I told her "People. Always people, they're more fascinating than anything. I fuckin' hate landscapes..."

It's a lie, in fact. I don't hate shooting landscapes. The point was that there is far too much landscape photography in the media we are all exposed to. I suppose defining the point of some subjects and differentiating the relevance of them is the real thrust here, instead of just telling you what my favourites are.

It is possible to arbitrarily divide topics into mountains of little categories. Surely everybody does it, just for simplification? Without special consideration, here we go:
– People > Portrait, Random, Drinking Photos, Fashion, Art
– Landscape > Urban, Not Urban (this is by far the larger category)
– Nature > Animals, Plants (> flowers, not flowers), Other (last one was creative eh?)
– Objects > I really haven't sub-divided this category. I suppose I don't shoot enough
objects to make it worth distinguishing.
There they are. By all means if you think of something else, mention it so I can fit it in somewhere or make space for it.

Since I defamed landscapes to Anna, I suppose I rather Owe them and should comment on why so many of them do, in fact, Suck.
A landscape necessarily encompasses a certain area. I think of an open field as the smallest unit of landscape. To shoot the facade of a building, or even the full building itself, is not usually a landscape so much as a single subject. Landscapes must present us manouevering room and show us how to navigate an area.

Too often there are landscapes that are too wide open, lacking any point of interest to anchor us. Inversely, the larger scale of a proper landscape often obscures any point of interest intended to anchor us, making it smaller, degrandizing it, stealing it's impact.

So What? Who Cares? Here's the crux of landscapes: The shooter was There. There is no denying the fact the geography one is surrounded by has an impact on us all. This is the key reason people will tend to shoot landscapes. They are shooting to make a reminder of this place where they stood that was instilling something into that moment lived by the shooter - emotion probably.

You and I weren't there, of course. In a vast majority of instances, we never will be there. That's okay still, if the shooter simply wants to use the image to illustrate a point of fact like "that's the field and on the side here is the cliff that we pushed the car over to destroy the evidence... see the scorch marks on the rock?"

People love to show you a 3x5 though, and expect you to Feeeel the grandeur and magnificence of standing wind-whipped and freezing on Kilimanjaro or wading wave-lashed throught the spray and foam into the stormy Pacific. It happens so much in fact, that I wonder how people Fail to correct this misconception of what an image can do.

An image is worth a thousand words, but here's a tip: try Writing a thousand words with it, so that the 3x5 is just a secondary. The words will become the picture itself and the picture will simply be Article A in evidence that states "yeah, it happened just like that!"

So there it is, most landscapes are only for the person who shot them. Exceptions abound. I do love to turn 180º and contradict. There are some truly magnificent landscape photographies out there that really will turn your head and make you want to be somewhere else. I find that at least half of these are quite exotic, if not unique 'scapes. It really requires Something unusual to draw you, without which you've got nothing but your memory of a place.

In contrast, we have the subject of people. In my reckoning the biggest difference is that a landscape is where we act. Perhaps it is the noun in our photographic experience. People are what we Interact with though, they are the verb. People can differ vastly amongst each other, yet faces and bodies are invariably and immediately something we can identify with. We know instinctively how to interpret them because we do it every day, all our lives. We are attuned to each nuance of expression in a face and we can admire each movement - each Moment of the body. It is easier for us to extrapolate the Feeling of a human image. We're more or less hardwired to do so anyway; I rather think we would have to work Not to do it.

I don't expect anybody to have the same purpose in photography as I do. Yet most people do have the same purpose: to communicate something, to elicit a reaction - a human reaction.

(I have tried showing photographs to several of my pets in my life; dogs, cats, birds, rats and iguanas. What they gravitate to, well I haven't been able to define any specific pattern for their predilections. My iguana seemed to react best to specific colour palettes, though my dog(s) don't see in colour, I'm told).