I like to think that every photographer develops their own stomping ground- a handful of go-to places one knows they can go to and emerge with a few interesting photographs every time. For me, two such places are upstate New York, where I used to go almost every weekend up until college and Prague, Czech Republic, where I see my family a few times a year. However, about a year ago I began to feel that I was running out of photographic ideas in both. How can one redefine meaning in a place they have been to dozens or hundreds of times?
Although upstate New York (rural/nature) and Prague (urban/architecture/historic) are fundamentally different, I found a solution to my problem that worked equally well in both places- I started hunting for the smaller details. In New York, I moved away from framing the landscapes and broad farmland I was overly familiar with to shooting an individual leaf cracking in the wind or a series of fence posts extending towards the horizon. Suddenly, a whole new world opened up to me at the macro level. Using the same technique in Prague, my focus shifted from the sea of red-bricked roofs in the old part of the city to a reflection in a single window, or from a typical crowd of eager tourists crossing a bridge to a single figure walking down an empty cobble street.
One can find the deepest meaning in the small stuff so start looking!
A reflection from a door at Hlavní Nádraží (Main Train Station) in Prague