We’ve all done. Drive up to a scenic spot, get out of the car, walk up to the guard rail, snap a photo, get back into the car and drive off. The perfect Kodak moment captured forever. You get back and review your photos and it’s delete, delete, delete.
If you want your images to be memorable they need to be meaningful. In the above photo the image was of the shoreline. No boats, no people, no clouds, no sunset, nothing there. Now I’m not saying there always needs to be a subject, William Eggleston has made a career of taking photos of nothing, but most good photos need a reason to be taken.
My photo above isn’t a great photo but it has the features that I always look for so its a keeper. First there is the graphic nature of the image, lots of lines. A silhouette is better than a flat ocean. The woman is in motion taking the image. The gesture of her arm raised to her head. The sailboat makes a nice little detail at the top of the image. The different bands of motion in the water creates competing areas of gray. Some bands with detail others with no detail. The white line at the bottom breaks the tension in the mass of black at the bottom of the image.
And my reason for the photo is for showing a moment in time from a different perspective. Also I like images that are simple but have little extras to make an image more than just a snapshot. Before pressing the shutter button really look deeply at the scene to find an angle to make it different. There are to many duplicate Kodak moments out there already.