Pictures I love that aren't particularly interesting or technically perfect

I take A LOT of pictures, in fact I rarely leave the house without a camera, usually my favourite compact but sometimes I make do with my phone.

Many photographers believe in limiting yourself, like a roll of film, you give yourself a set number of shots (or you use just one fixed lens) and this causes you to think more and be pickier with your shots. I don’t really do that. I’m the kind of person who sees something they like, takes a picture of it, maybe even a dozen different ones and then decides if they like how it looks. I think of it as having no regrets in my photography. If the shot doesn’t work, it doesn’t work but at least I won’t have to deal with wondering whether or not it would have.

As a photographer I like to keep my pictures relatively clean. I usually focus on singular subjects and strong colour harmony. In general I try to keep a discernible subject or event in each image and try to keep things as technically sound as possible in terms of image quality. While I’m not too worried about things like sharpness as I once was when I first started, I still try to maintain a good level of clarity in my published work.

However, there are times when I end up with images that don’t really have much meaning to them, aren’t particularly interesting or have some sort of technical error in them that I very much enjoy but don’t really publish due to these flaws.

But then again, what really makes an image perfect, it is all creative expression at the end of the day, it doesn’t really need to adhere to any rules. That being said, I’m going to talk about some of these images, what makes them imperfect under my own style and why I love them regardless.

One of the first pictures I took on my Fuji compact when I got back to Dhaka with it. I love how green this picture is and it fits the isolated subject trend I like but theres something about the angle and the scene itself, its just too bland

This picture is all about the colour harmony between the sky and these cranes, I took this on a boat near the docks in Barcelona and I tried really hard to make it interesting but I could only make it sort of pretty. I still really like it, its very visually pleasing but maybe if I had a wider perspective on this it’d be better

I saw this man in the raincoat from a few metres away, we were speeding by in a car, I set everything up to get him frozen but it was so dark, I ended up missing focus and it led to this blur. This picture is probably one of the most usable in its imperfect state though and that burst of colour in the dull background is a real favourite for me.

The lake near my house has only been getting greener over time, I walked over there a couple months ago and there was this little patch where they were building a bridge. I loved how it looked almost like a dystopian, nuclear dumped scene. I think this picture really needed a person to stand somewhere in the right third of the image to really complete it, possibly in a suit made of foil?

When I took this picture, again from a car, I was hoping to follow the motorcycle with my camera and get one shot with it frozen and some motion blur in the background. I saw the colours from the lights and I knew it would look good. What I ended up with was exactly the opposite, A more or less frozen background and a motion blurred bike, but oh the colours

This picture is from a shoot I did for my sisters clothes, This dress has all these fringes and we were trying to get some motion to show that off, the flash malfunctioned on a few shots and so the resultant images were really dark. I pulled the exposure up and they revealed this (and several others). Grainy, blurry, to the point of almost looking like a painting. This was imperfect in every sense but it just looked so good to me

This one is a little different, I took this back in 2016 while on vacation and I really like this picture. I love how the pattern on the womans dress is different from the paintings in the back but they still sort of mesh together. It would have made for an amazing shot had that man on the right not just walked in. In hindsight, if I’d seen the potential for this image when I took it, I probably would have checked it and waited for an unobstructed one.

Okay this is going to be a bit similar for both this one and the next picture, I love both of these, very much, I don’t think they’re uninteresting or imperfect, I think they both show a very unique colour balance. This is just white, white pipes, white paint, white windows and yet it has a beauty to it, one that’s not plain as is normally associated with white. It’s not particularly clean either its warm somehow

This last one I think is perfect, some might even say its a perfect ‘me’ picture. Its a horizontal straight shot, I love those, Its got marvelous colour, I LOVE that and the colour is so well balanced that is so strong yet subtle at the same time. Which begs the question, why is this here? Well what if the uninteresting images were too boring? Had to pad this with something to keep it fun.

P.S This is Shahed Sami and I love him