Fuel costs are pushing a lot of people to rethink how far they drive just to take photos, and that pressure might actually improve your photography. Finding compelling images close to home is a skill, and most people haven’t developed it because they’ve never had a reason to try.
Coming to you from Andrew Banner, this thought-provoking video follows Banner on a walk through the countryside near his home, shooting shapes, textures, and everyday objects most people would walk straight past. He’s shooting with his camera set to a high-contrast black and white profile, which immediately changes how he sees things like fence posts, plowed furrows, and teasel plants catching harsh midday light. Banner makes a point early on that he isn’t chasing epic shots here. He’s looking for lines, contrast, and graphic simplicity, and the images he pulls from an ordinary field and a local church are genuinely hard to argue with.
One of the more useful ideas Banner raises is the concept of “observational photography.” It’s not landscape photography, street photography, or any genre with a tidy definition. It’s the practice of noticing things and deciding whether they can be made to look interesting in two dimensions. Every image he captures has a clear, unambiguous subject, and that’s not accidental. He talks about how human vision detects edges through contrast, and how that understanding shapes every compositional decision he makes. He also touches on why mundane subjects are actually a better training ground than dramatic landscapes, partly because you don’t need a 4 a.m. alarm, a long drive, or perfect weather to access them.
Banner argues, pretty convincingly, that the reason most people find their local area boring is simply that they haven’t trained themselves to look properly. Telegraph poles in a flat field, road signs, church pews lit by leaded windows — none of these are obviously photogenic until someone shows you the image and you realize you would never have seen it that way. He also brings in a reference to a short video by Tomasz Trzebiatowski, editor of Frames magazine, which touches on photographic depiction and connects in interesting ways to Banner’s own approach. Check out the video above for the full walkthrough and images from Banner.