Photographing with intent

Like a lot of hobbyists, I find photography compelling, boring, frustrating, all-consuming, deeply satisfying, maddening, transcendent, and fun, depending on the day.

Some days (most days?) I seem to take repetitive, boring images of the same damn thing – my Google Photos account serves me up photo memories over the years where I've taken the same damn shot.

One challenge I think is that Victoria is a small town. I don't like to drive, and so most of the time I head out to take photos in generally the same geographic area – our small downtown to the north of me, and then the character neighbourhood and shoreline that borders me to the south.

This constraint can actually be good. The street photographers that Paul B interviews on his excellent YouTube channel are generally walking the same streets of Manhattan, with annual side trips to Coney Island. But, having been to Manhattan recently (check back to links to photos as they come up), I can say that, wow, yes, there are so many more people to take photos of. And, what's more, they generally don't care if you point a camera at them!

The sheer density of people doesn't really occur in Victoria except for cruise ship season, which I'll get to in a sec. So I need to figure out creative ways to take interesting photos that are trying to, if not say something, at least tell a story.

Looking back at 2024, I've found that what I consider my best photos are from times where I have set out with intent. I know generally the image I want to take, I consider what gear and what settings I need to take that photo, and then give myself time to achieve.

This is probably Photography 101 for a lot of photographers, but it was still a discovery to me.

The header photo was taken at sunset at Swensen's Ice Cream in San Francisco. I knew I wanted to capture this place – I love neon and other kinds of eye candy – and I set out to do it. I ended up hanging around for about an hour, shooting probably a hundred photos (not really a spray-and-pray approach, exactly), using a small, low tripod I placed on the sidewalk.

I got a couple of photos I liked, including this one:

Cruise ships and photographing with intent

Downtown Victoria can get jam-packed at certain times during cruise ship season, which lasts I think from April until the end of October each year. Massive cruise ships dock right in my neighbourhood.

Then, instead of making the 15-20 minute walk to downtown, passengers board buses and taxis that deposit them, en masse, in a very small footprint of space.

They walk a couple of blocks to grab an ice cream or a cheap souvenir (the supposed $200M they spend annually is actually a trivial drop in the bucket of Victoria's $25B economy), so there's quite a crowd.

And an opportunity to take pictures.

The thing is, most street photographers will walk for hours and hours, probably at least 20,000 steps, and may get just one decent image. So it's more than just density of people.

To take truly great street photography, you need to have stories, and the thing about cruise ship passengers is that they are all going to look the same, and they're going to be doing pretty much the same thing.

However, another tactic for making use of this big, dense mass of people is to take street portraits. Ask people for their photo. Take the photo. Promise to share it with them.

It take a bit of chutzpah, but I'm sure I can do it. Stay tuned...

I got the idea for the Swensen's photos after watching this YouTube video by Joey Yee, who has done such a great job documenting San Francisco: