Urban Fog

A story of seeing what’s there

There are many styles of photography, and the advice used to be to pick one and specialize. Do you want to do portrait photography? Pet or human? Wedding photography? Or choose from wildlife photography, landscape photography, macro photography, astrophotography, etc.

I’m pretty sure that advice was primarily meant for professionals. It makes sense that if you’re trying to earn a living from photography, specialization provides opportunity to develop deep skills related to your area. Different equipment might be needed, as well as soft skills. Wildlife photographers, for example, don’t have to worry about encounters with stressed out couples soon to be wed and all that entails. Wedding photographers don’t have to worry their subject might fly away or run off (well, let’s hope not!).

I’ve always felt free to ignore the advice to specialize, because that’s just how I roll. However, I recently saw a professional photographer say the advice is outdated for professionals too. Somewhere between the extremes of “only do one kind of photography” and “do everything” is a sweet spot that we each must find for ourselves.

I can safely rule out any style of photography that involves clients or coordinating with other people. This is my hobby, and I don’t have time to run a small business. I also would hate trying to meet anyone’s expectations of my artistic endeavors. I create because I want to create, not because I have to, or because anyone likes what I create. Toss a paying client into the mix, and then I’d have to take on the stress of someone else’s desires. No thanks!

I’m primarily a nature photographer because I like taking pictures while I’m walking or hiking. The camera is just a way to further enjoy my walk, and it helps me to walk a reasonable distance and pace, with plenty of rest breaks. I mostly want to be a wildlife photographer, but the wildlife isn’t under any obligation to show up for that. Therefore, I also do some landscape and macro photography.

Between those three, I can almost always find something interesting to photograph. The equipment needs overlap, too, so why not do all three? Each style requires different strategy and skill, so there’s plenty there to keep me amused.

Two additional styles of photography have long interested me, but I’ve barely dabbled in them: astrophotography and urban photography. That’s starting to change, however. Some of that is the result of the wide array of features on my new camera bodies and the capabilities of modern cameras. Some of that is simply that I want to expand my capabilities.

Astrophotography always intimidated me. The settings you need aren’t like the other types of photography I do, and I didn’t know how to configure my camera. That style of photography also requires a tripod, and I hate messing around with those. Not to mention the ones I could afford years ago were too honking heavy to lug around.

Now I have an inexpensive and lightweight tripod I bought on Amazon. The camera bodies I bought have features specifically for astrophotography. And finally, there are YouTube brand ambassadors that create videos to help you configure your camera for such things.

None of this changes my biggest barrier, which is the fact I’m not a night person, and I find it hard to drive after dark. However, living in Minnesota means short days in the fall, winter, and spring, so you don’t have to be up as late here. Getting back into camping also puts me into darker areas so I don’t have to drive to and from a place just to take pictures. I simply step out of my tent and walk to an open patch of sky nearby. So you’ll see some astrophotography in this newsletter now and then. Even pictures of the northern lights, which was a bucket list item I didn’t cross off my list until May of 2024.

Now let’s turn to urban photography. This style of work is easily accomplished with my equipment. However, I always thought you had to go somewhere interesting like downtown Minneapolis to do it. Or some large gathering like the state fair. The problem is that urban environments with their miles of concrete and crowds are hard for me to physically navigate. It’s difficult for me to drive to them, and I become worn out pretty quickly once I get there. Concrete is painful to walk on for long.

Toss in things like food allergies, and now my Covid risk, and it just feels too inaccessible. I simply can’t meet my physical needs easily enough in such environments to want to go walking around them for a couple of hours with the weight of a camera. I think about going on a day off, quickly determine I’m too tired to cope with it, and decide to do something else that isn’t so hard on my body.

Except then I watched a YouTube video by an urban photographer in which he pointed out that the “boring neighborhood” right out your own door is interesting to people who don’t live there. He’s somewhere in Asia (I forget which country) and it turns out a lot of the really interesting and exciting pictures I see on his channel aren’t from the city; they’re from his very own neighborhood. Walk out your own door with your camera, he urged, and start taking pictures. Do that every day, and you’ll grow your skills as an urban photographer.

Well, dang. I had never considered that. So basically, any time I go to an urban park, I could also be doing urban photography. Or I can just walk out my own front door. So that’s what I did the other day when I took all the foggy pictures in the last newsletter. I decided to do some urban photography around the park I went to.

That makes so much sense! See, when I go to an urban park, I work really hard to try to hide the fact that I’m in the city. I’d prefer to give the impression I’m out in nature, and not distract with houses, electric wires, concrete, cars, etc. But if I include those things? Well, then I’m doing urban photography right along side my nature photography.

How did I not see that before? I’m a photographer. We’re supposed to be seeing what’s around us. Yet I was so busy trying not to see what was around me if it was man made that it didn’t occur to me it might be interesting and worthy of photographing in its own right.

Doing this kind of urban photography has me appreciating the urban environment that surrounds me more. At heart, I hate living in a city. I’d rather be in a rural area. However, rural areas are too physically demanding for me to live in all the time. You have to drive a long way to buy groceries, for example. And even further for the physical therapy I need at times. You have to be a lot more self-sufficient in a rural area, and I’m just not up for that. For as much as I hate concrete, I need the infrastructure found in urban environments.

I will face health related barriers anywhere I go. On the whole, an urban environment better meets my needs than a rural area. I’d love to live in a small town as a compromise. I even think about moving to one sometimes, especially now that my camping adventures expose me to more of them. However, I’m not sure I could easily get the healthcare I need in a small town. By the time I need physical therapy, for example, I also need a quick, low stress way to get there.

I guess if I’m to live out my life in a large urban area, I might as well embrace the photographic opportunities it brings. I would love to get candid shots of people in such pictures as I greatly admire that in the images of skilled urban photographers. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel comfortable doing that type of urban photography, however, even though I’ve seen tips on how to do it.

Although my new cameras make it easier to be stealthy about it, you may have noticed that I obscure people’s faces when I post pictures here. I would do that whether it was my face or someone else’s. I want to respect people’s privacy, and taking their picture without their knowledge runs counter to that.

Legally, if someone is in a public place in the U.S. and the picture is not for commercial use, you don’t need a model release. None of us has a legal expectation of privacy in public places, which is why security cameras can proliferate, for example. It also means street photography is perfectly legal. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, however. I’m simply not comfortable taking a picture of someone without their consent and putting it up on the internet.

I’m ok with publishing shots of crowds, if you can’t see individual faces. However, I find street photography with recognizable faces compelling, so I’d love to hone that skill. Maybe someday I’ll work up the courage to ask people if I can photograph them. If they say yes, great, and I’ll take a posed shot so I don’t have to explain I already took one when they didn’t notice (candid shots are interesting!). If they say no when I ask, then I’ll delete any images I took before they knew I was doing it.

In the meantime, I’ll be happy with photographing the places people populate, even when there’s nobody in the frame. It goes without saying I’d never photograph children, even if you couldn’t see faces, unless I had parental permission. Even then, I don’t think I’m interested. Not when I’m posting these publicly.

That’s another reason why I am primarily a nature photographer. The wildlife might be disturbed by your activity as a photographer, so you still need to be considerate of your subject. However, you don’t need to consider whether your subject will mind if the pictures are shared publicly. The wildlife also doesn’t care if you took a picture of its bad side, or if it was having a bad hair day.