I realized that the reason I am stuck in mediocrity is because

>>2968500
>How do I find an interesting theme for a series of photographs?
you use your noggin

>>2968500
>how do I get ideas?
play around, get out of your comfort zone, consult other art (books/music/painting), record your thoughts. how many interesting new ideas do you come across in an average day? you really think everyone else is just overflowing with them?

>>2968500
You have to decide for youself what you want to say with your pictures. For inspiration, look at bodies of work by photographers. Think about what you want and believe.

>>2968500

get all your best and not so best shots in a folder, even better you could print them. look at the group and find the commonalities and patterns.

Go out and just walk around. If something interests you, explore that further.

P simple bro

>>2968500
While it can be a conscious process, it's rooted in instinctual curiosity. You can snap a photo of a skyline and it will be just like every stock image on the net.

Don't just snap one picture of a thing, explore it in photos. Take the same subject and photograph it a hundred different ways.

>>2968500
FART

Don't be a boring fuck. So basically you've already failed. What a disgusting question to even have to ask.

>>2968583
You're like that Jewish goblin in New York from that YouTube video
You know the one, where he's telling the trumpet player to shut the fuck up
That's what you sound like

>>2971742
The trumpet player was practising and doing what he wanted.
He wasn't just looking at his instrument and asking passers by what he should play.

Meaning, theme and creativity aren't gear. You have to live your life being interested and engaged with your surroundings, you have to be curious. If you aren't doing those things already, why did you even buy a camera?
It's like buying an instrument without even enjoying music, just eww.

http://digital-photography-school.com/99-remarkable-photographers-portfolios/

Check out #4

>>2968500
Good photos don't have meaning. They are only pleasing to the eye.

>>2968500
> I just go out and take photos of anything I find interesting.
That's good. Some of these things will actually be interesting.

Do it enough that you start to know what a person who has seen a lot of places still finds interesting.

While you do that, operator- & gearfag it up and look to it that you can shoot well in that regard so you'll eventually not get many low quality / missed shot anymore.

Eggleston is a shit and I blame him for the surge aesthetic photographers

File: dude in the back was cancer.png (946KB, 1024x682px) Image search: [Google]

946KB, 1024x682px

>>2968500
A good photo has at least three of these 5 elements:
>nature
>civilization
>humans
>animals
>magic

Anything less than that needs to be really good in order to make it. Journalism is boring, you need to aim for art. That means paying attention to coloring, subject matter, and the harmony between all the things in your shot.

One really easy way to have a good photo is to tell a story. Have a gander at pic related. Someone posted it to /fa/ and I edited it to look like this.

File: dude in the back is cancer.jpg (147KB, 1024x682px) Image search: [Google]

147KB, 1024x682px

>>2971991
but even though he had a cancerous pose that tarnished the photo, I realized that the photo looks bad still because it's lacking a dark figure in the background to help keep the photo anchored and solid. I would like to photoshop someone in with a body facing towards the front guy mysteriously.

As far as colors go, this photo is awesome. As for as those elements I talked about go, it has definitely humans, civilization, and nature, and perhaps magic, which is just an ambiguous category I created to capture the ineffable and arresting elements in a shot. The dude is all red and everything, which you know is just the lighting from a sign but still is quite interesting.

As far as the story goes, I could imagine that this guy is a rebel of some sort, a Chaotic Neutral ethical computer cracker who'll be on his way to a meeting after finishing his smoke, If the dark figure in the background were shopped in, you would see that the guy would not be making it to his meeting anytime soon. You could expect conflict. This is the calm before the storm.

>>2971827
I hope this is ironic