Why I stopped taking photographs almost altogether

You do not need to be the first, to be the newest, to be the most unique, to stand out at all, on anything you do - including pictures.<p>Your entire life and everything you do in it is more like a vote than it is a work of art. That&#x27;s a good thing.<p>You can take a low res picture of that sunset in a mundane place half obscured by trees and local housing because you want to emphasize the moment and how you feel in it. It does not need to be a commodity to share.<p>High quality photos are great, but comparing the photos you would take to capture part of your life to the photos others take of theirs is like judging an autobiography by the font choice.<p>Right here, right now, you vote with every action you take. Photo, small talk, dream job, favorite ice cream, whatever. To me, a million people taking different kinds of shitty photos of something is much more interesting than the single highest quality professional photograph of the same thing.<p>We will have nice photos of everything, that&#x27;s great, but if we all stop doing our own shitty versions of stuff then so much signal is lost across the population as a whole

This is perhaps one of the sadder articles I have ever seen on here, and endemic of a lot other parts of society. &quot;Somebody already posted a pretty picture online, there is now no point in me taking pictures ever again.&quot;<p>Imgur&#x2F;Tiktok&#x2F;TV give me this sensation constantly. The pictures and lives they all claim to have are all so incredible, I should never move again. I can never do anything as cool or fun as them anyway. I just should just sit alone and jitter with jealousy&#x2F;misery&#x2F;desire&#x2F;hate at how boring my life is compared to &quot;get naked in the woods and have a dance party island.&quot;

That was <i>really</i> confusing to me. The article gave no real reason why the author stopped taking photos. It&#x27;s not at all clear that he what he did was stop taking photos to upload to Wikipedia.

Seems odd to me. It&#x27;s certainly true for the few percent of most popular subjects but not for the long tail.<p>Load the wikipedia page for the town you live in or a less populous neighboring town. Follow the links to the articles on some of the things in your town-- parks, etc. For most people you&#x27;ll immediately find articles without images. Searching the internet usually won&#x27;t get you images or at least not any freely licensable ones.<p>And when you do find images they&#x27;re often random snapshots and not images taken with a particular eye for their educational&#x2F;informative&#x2F;representative qualities. If there are <i>many</i> photos then sure, suitable ones can be found. But when there are few pictures then getting one that captures the right presentation is just luck unless you go and take one.<p>A problem I&#x27;ve seen on Wikipedia is that I&#x27;d go through a lot of work to create an illustration for an article, then someone will replace it with another image which is then removed on its own merits (like a non-freely licensed one, or some vanity picture of themself)... and no one goes back and rescues the prior image from the history. I wouldn&#x27;t mind if my contribution had been replaced by something even better, but it&#x27;s a bit sad to see it lost to wikirot.<p>There are whole domains of archivist photography that could be included on Wikipedia (or on sister pages for subjects on commons) that are largely untapped-- images captured from the same location at different times of day or times of year, HDR panoramas for capturing incident lighting at a location, intentional catalogs of plant and animal life, 3d models, etc. The only domain that you can say is already well covered is random tourist snapshots of locations tourists are prone to visit.

<i>I can still be glad for all Wikimedians taking photographs in rural areas, and of short events, Wikimedia culture, hard-to-access places, hard-to-find items, and other subjects that are rarely available as free images.</i><p>Yeah, if you live in a small town, it can be hard to find good photos of it online at all.<p>I will note that regardless of size, cities are living things (a la the phrase &quot;living language&quot;) and photos can rapidly become out of date when new structures go up, policies change, etc. So while the author of this piece has chosen to largely stop taking such photos, which is fine, there is really no reason to feel like &quot;There are <i>enough</i> photos of [some big city] and we just don&#x27;t need more.&quot;<p>Skylines change. Cultural practices change. Etc.<p>Sometimes you notice that change because you went looking at photos and noticed something that you didn&#x27;t notice while living through those changes firsthand.

Someone once told me three-quarters of your photographs should be of people, since those are the only ones you&#x27;ll care about in a decade, and the rest should be for people.<p>Perhaps Wikipedia photographs count as &quot;for people&quot;.

It&#x27;s always weird to me when everyone at a fireworks show on the Fourth of July has their phones out taking video. There are a gazillion videos of better fireworks shows taken with better video equipment. Why do you need a phone video of this one?<p>If you&#x27;re taking a short clip to post to social media, I can understand that, but these people who hold their phones up and watch the show through the screen for the entire duration... why?

I live in an area that has very little information on Wikipedia and virtually no photographs. How would I find out what would be an appropriate kind of photograph to put on Wikipedia? I feel like editors as a rule are very hostile and it makes me anxious to contribute anything.

Tldr: Because there already exist many photographs of what I photograph that are of good quality, and time seems to be better spent obtaining such photographs from others&#x27; collection than photographing them directly.<p>This gets me thinking about the issue of doing something for the satisfaction of the creative process vs the satisfaction of the practicality of the end result.

There are so many missing photographs. Perhaps we have enough pictures of Times Square, but we don&#x27;t have enough pictures of inline water heaters, German International Driving Permits and so on.<p>I take a lot of those pictures because I need them to explain things, and they simply don&#x27;t exist. I made a habit of releasing them on Wikimedia Commons for others to use.

“Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward.” – Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita<p>Why cooking when you can order food? Anything done with your own hands will satisfy you much more even if not as good as the ready-made option.

I don&#x27;t usually photograph places and stuff but I do take pictures of people I care about in places and in front of stuff. That I enjoy. But the really cool buildings and things I usually grab a picture online that&#x27;s way better than what I would make.

Summary: this person stopped taking photos and uploading them to Wikipedia because public photos of urban areas that contribute to digital archives are now abundant.<p>Given the title, I was expecting something about why they stopped photography as a hobby, which is not what this article is about.