What makes a photographer good?

What makes a photographer good? Does making a good photograph from a beautiful subject make a photographer good or making a good photograph from a subject that is not beautiful?

I spent the morning I wrote this looking at a popular photography website. The photographs listed as “popular” as voted by the visitors almost entirely consisted of landscapes at sunrise/sunset, beautiful women in various stages of dress and undress, exotic locations, and wildlife closeups. There were very rarely photographs of mundane everyday things.

Years ago a person said to me, “Anyone can take a good photograph of a flower. It’s hard to make a flower look bad.” At the time I thought, “that’s not true” but think about it. You have to really work at making a flower look bad. Go and look at a bunch of landscape photographs and you will see lots and lots of photographs of landscaped at sunrise/sunset or otherwise great lighting. You will see oceans, moutains, lakes, waterfalls.

Here is what you won’t see, or won’t see a lot of. You won’t see wide open spaces at midday. The photograph above I shot at 1:50 PM on a bright sunny day. Standing there looking at this scene in person I was in awe. I felt like I could see forever. Wide open country.

A search of the keyword “plains” on this photography website brought about a very interesting return. Many of the photographs tagged as plains were not of plains. There were mountains, forests, and the desert. The images that were of the plains were African plains with elephans, lions, zebras, and other wildlife. There were truly only a handful of images I’d classify as plains.

Yes, all the photographs I saw today were awesome but just like the person told me years ago about the flowers, you would have to really try to muck up the photographs of beautiful landscapes and beautiful people.

Is it too hard to take good photographs of ordinary things and places? Do we just want to do what’s easy? My challenge to myself and hopefully others is to take make ordinary things and places look good. Let’s face it, so many of us live in ordinary places and are surrounded by ordinary things.