The beauty of the unseen: Everyday scenes through a photographers eyes

I used to use Circular Quay in Sydney quite regularly, but never noticed the little dolphins in the railing by the ferry terminal. The first part of photographing the “unseen” is to see it! And we covered that to some extent in the last podcast.

If you’ve tried the exercises from the previous podcast, you may well have found that there are a lot of details in your everyday environment that you’ve previously overlooked. And, no doubt, some of them have a beauty all of their own.

This podcast is about finding the beauty and the story in everyday scenes. Be it on your way to work or school, or anywhere else you might go regularly.

The first thing to do is to see your environment with beginner's eyes.  For one thing, it’s a great way to get to know your local environment, and I suggest that you extend that knowledge by thinking about what a tourist to your area might photograph.

Imagine you have to create a tourist brochure of your area. Which 5 photographs would create a compelling story of your area?

Practice looking for the beauty in your area. Here are 5 suggestions, but I’m sure that you can find more:

• While on your morning routine
• Taking a walk around your block
• Visiting a grocery store
• Visiting a waiting room (while being respectful of people’s privacy, of course)
• Shooting your room from different angles (try 5)

One challenge is to find 3 great compositions in your most boring room!

Reflect on how this made you feel.  

And you can share your photographs on my Facebook page: Graham Elliott Photography.

It's time for another podcast...

Please take a look at the 2026 Wildlife Calendar. It's available now.

Transcript

>> Graham: 0:08

Foreign. Hello, I'm Graeme Elliott, and in this podcast I'm going to continue from the previous podcast. And that's to just continue this little theme within the podcast for, For a short while of how to see the world through the eyes of the photographer. So how does a photographer see things? And I think this is, a useful exercise. Hopefully you do, too. Hopefully you enjoyed the last one if you listen to it. And the focus of this podcast is to just find the visual interest, the beauty, if you like, of ordinary places. And typically they will be where you live. And, one of the things I like about this is that this is something I always recommend for people, especially from a wildlife perspective. but also if you are traveling generally, is to just go around, photograph your local area. And there's a couple of reasons for doing that. One is it gets you familiar and kind of in the groove again with your camera and how it operates and those little things, little settings that you don't use that often. And then when it comes to when you haven't used the camera for a few months, you, can't quite remember how you did them. And the other thing about it is it really works on your skills about observation. And that was primarily what I was talking about in the last podcast. And the reason for doing it at home is that if you can really begin to see what you have at home, I think it really works, that muscle, if you like, so that when you go to somewhere new, it might be overseas or it might be somewhere else, but you're already. Your mind is already tuned in, your eyes are already kind of looking for the interesting things in that environment. So this is why I see this as being so important. certainly personally, it's something I've done quite a lot. And I have to say that in doing that, it's actually made me understand the history of where I lived a lot more. And that's particularly true, I think, where I first grew up, because I grew up in England, lived in Australia and now France at the moment. And, I've lived in other places. And I'm sure there are many of you who've had that experience too. But I have to say it was where I grew up I kind of took for granted because I knew it since I was a child. it changed a little bit, but not that much. Some of it was very old. It went back to. That, went back to the Doomsday Book. It was quite an old, the old town was quite old, around a thousand years. And, it Was boring because I could just walk there. So it was interesting when I started setting myself challenges, when I began to seriously learn photography and go beyond the, the sort of snapshot idea, which is what I grew up with. People who used. Took photographs around me. That's what they did, what I refer to as snapshots. And I think the most interesting place was, a church in the old town. So I grew up in a place called Hemel Hempstead. You might know it. And, there's an old church there in the. In the old town. And I just set myself the task of just photographing and kind of documenting this place. But I did find it really interesting because all of a sudden there was history to it that I didn't really know, didn't really appreciate. And, frankly, where I grew up felt to me really boring. And maybe you may well have the same feeling of where you grown up if it's, Mine was a Hemel Hempstead newtown was built in the 50s. I arrived in the early 60s, and that was the kind of environment I grew up in. So one of the most important things I think we can do as photographers is really set ourselves the challenge and to get into that habit of really looking at what's around. Looking. Looking at places as if you'd never seen them before. Because then I think we really start to see what's there. So the key thing about this is it's not so much what you're looking at, it's how you see it. It's, you know, what are you looking at? What are you looking at in terms of the detail of what's there? So what makes something interesting? Well, we come back to really, the standard things. there's not so much that's new here, but it's just getting into the habit of using them. So think about light, think about emotion, think about story. Be a visual storyteller. Think about contrast, think about timing. So all of the things that come together to make something interesting and then add your particular input to it by thinking about framing, composition, your viewpoint. How can you start to make that ordinary scene really interesting? Just elevate it. And of course, what we regard as ordinary, because it's funny, it might be really exciting to somebody else. So never write something off for that reason either. So examples of things that you might shoot. And I have to say, when I do this, and I don't do it very often, but it'd be things like Laundromats or grocery stores or markets Ah, markers are great because you can have real, m, you know, amazing colors. If you go to, say a food market where they've got fruit and fish and things like that on a sunny day, and if people have come out in bright clothes, all that kind of thing, you can have a ride of color in these sort of environments. Or you could shoot them in black and white, which tells a different story. It's more documentary. but remember, black and white is much more about shapes and textures and can be calm, a little abstract. And you can certainly sort of something I like to do with black and white is just push the contrast really hard and then I get something that starts to definitely lean into the abstract. But again, color can do the same. So you can work with a subject as a photographer and just create a different feel, a different look to it. so where are the places that you can go? So typically it would be whatever your morning routine is. And remember, you're just looking at these. You don't have to have a camera with you. You can do, of course, morning, routine. Where you would go normally in the morning might be to work, school, wherever. It could be a walk around your block where you live. how many times have you walked around and really seen what's there now? I'm going to just make, a suggestion here that you don't peer into neighbors, windows and things like that, particularly with the camera, because that isn't good. It's not what I'm suggesting. But, yeah, look around. Look at what, what makes, what would characterize the neighborhood where you live if you had to tell the story of that place in five images, what would those five images be? And if you were looking at it from the beauty of it. So let's say that you were going to do a, tourist brochure. You're, you want to attract overseas visitors. And what would. And you had five pictures. Okay, I'm going to use five pictures to do that. That's the challenge. So what are you going to photograph and how are you going to handle those photographs? What's the look that you're going to go for? What will create an emotion in somebody looking at those images of excitement, of joy, somewhere they want to go. So this is a way of challenging your creativity, if you like. And, this also builds on the, the limitations challenge that or the podcast I did a few weeks ago, where having these constraints can really get you thinking and get your, get the creative part of you working. So this is the idea Again, so morning routine, walk around the block. Is there a grocery store, Is there a market, A waiting room perhaps? Obviously you need to be conscious of, people and respecting their rights to privacy. But it could be your own home or your own room from a different angle. So again, shoot it with a different lens, Go really wide angle. If you can do that. Shoot from low down, shoot from a high vantage point. All these kinds of things start to create a different look. You'll start to see something you've maybe seen hundreds of times, but see it differently for the first time. In fact, this used to be the one of the challenges I would give to people on photo walks in, Circular Quay in Sydney. So if you don't know Circular Quay, you got that Harbour Bridge on one side, the Opera House on the other. Lots and lots of tourists. the actual area where the ferries come in, you've got a railway station, tram, all that kind of stuff. So it's a really busy area. It's pretty much, I would say from a, tourist perspective, it's probably the place to go. there are others around Sydney, but that I would suggest to be number one. So on a typical day, you've got thousands of people, tens of thousands, going through Circle Quay and a lot of them are taking photographs. Obviously the tourists will be. So my challenge used to be to people on the photo walk was to shoot a photograph that nobody else has taken that day. So that means you've really got to start looking around to what you're looking at. You're looking at details, you're looking at leading lines, you're looking at composition, you're looking at lighting, you're looking at reflections, you're looking at shadows, you're looking at what can do with time of day, because different times of day obviously give you different colors, different shadows. Golden Hour give you lovely oranges, that sort of color. Maybe longer shadows that you can work with. Photograph the shadows. So think about your composition, think about your viewpoint. Get down low. If I'm given that I used to do this for a while, there were certainly days when, I might not be quite as creative as I would like to be. I'm going to put it that way. So what I would do was just put my camera on the ground, either flat, this one of the canons. So it would be, either a normal landscape format or I'd signal on its side to do portrait and then just take a shot. So if I've got a wide angle zoom on, I just put it maximum Wide angle and far away and see what I got. And that usually would give me ideas because I'd start to see, okay, I've got some leading lines here, there are some people over here, I've got this going on over there, that kind of thing. So if you have your camera with you, and the great thing about digital, obviously we can see the results straight away. You can start to inspire yourself. I like to think of it as self inspiration, but it's a great way of approaching it if you're finding that you're really short of ideas. another thing about this is the idea of seeing it with fresh eyes. So I've already touched on this. But if you imagine when you go somewhere, you go somewhere new on holiday, maybe it's somewhere you've read about, you've known about for a long time, you're really excited about being there. It's, if you're anything like me, it's almost a century overload. There's lots and lots of things to see and I'm trying to take it all in. And it's not just visual, that's what I'm primarily interested in in this podcast. But you might have smells and sounds, things like that. So there can be a lot going on. And if I want to photograph, if I want to share it with someone, immediately I start to think about, okay, how can I tell the story of this place in such a way that with a few photographs someone can really get a sense of it and maybe the beauty of it or whatever it is I'm seeing. And this is again, as photographers, what we're doing is trying to pass on the feeling that we're getting when we see something usually. So look at wherever you are, whether it's somewhere at home or your normal walk in the morning, whatever it is, but approach it with beginners eyes. Just stop, look around, really take a good look at what's there. And this is a great way of rediscovering your own surroundings and seeing what's really there. And a great question to ask is what would a tourist photograph if they were visiting your town or your neighborhood, your village, wherever it is you live, your city? what would they photograph if they were trying to tell the story of the place or to let their friends and family have the experience vicariously of what it's like to visit where you live? What would be the photographs that you would take? So I'm going to give you, another challenge. So that's to these podcasts is slightly different to what I normally do. And, I want you to just think about taking three photographs, things you would normally overlook or at least pretend to take the photographs. I mean, you don't have to have your camera with you, but I think it's more powerful if you actually take the photographs. Just things you normally overlook and just things that you're going to see today or tomorrow, depending on when you listen to this podcast. so this again is working on the observation skills, but it also is trying to get into the habit of looking at things with fresh eyes. So an example could be to shoot your walk, your daily walk. It could be your kitchen. If you're, maybe making breakfast, I don't know, or you spend a lot of time in the kitchen for whatever. but do that from five angles. So take five photographs so you can expand on this. I'd say take three to five. Ah, but if you're doing, more of a study. So if it's a room, I would say go for five images that tell the story of that room. Give someone the sense of it and maybe add some emotion in there. Now I'm sort of throwing this out there and you can do with it what you will, but this is where some of this stuff might sound just wacky. And I can't do that because that's just nuts. But give it a go. Just see how far you get. Just try new things. You're always welcome to, pop things on the, Graham Elliott Photography Facebook page. If you jump onto Facebook and Google. Graham Elliott Photography. That's spartan. The logo, G R A H A M E double L I O double T Photography. And yeah, you know, share with others. And you're welcome to join the, you know, become a follower or whatever on the Facebook page. and, go from there. So I'm gonna wind this one up. so the purpose of this podcast is just to start really getting you to think about the beauty of the everyday. Because I think when you stop, and I think it's especially true when we visit somewhere new, but we're much more open to seeing the beauty of everyday scenes. Things that would normally be unseen by the people who live there, because they just see, they just walk past it. They don't even take any notice. And this, I think is a really valuable skill because you can tell the story of your own home, your own neighborhood. And one of the things I really love about that, I love looking at old photographs. The photographs from, well, 2000s, a long time ago now. Crikey. but all the night, the 80s. Particularly for me, the 80s, 70s, 60s, and before that, or going back 100 years, what did a place I know look like 100 years ago? I find those pictures really interesting, to look at just how people were, what sort of cars people were driving, if they had cars, if. Or is it horse? Horses. how are they dressed? What. What were the roads like, what sort of condition, how busy was it? What did the shop fronts look like, if it's, the town center? so this, to me is it creates an interesting document. And these might also be photographs that. Not, that big a deal when you shoot them right now, but going forward 10 years, you might look back on them and just notice the differences that have occurred in those years. So this, I think, is a really interesting exercise, and that was why I thought I would share it. So just remember to. I've given you the challenge. Have a go at that. see how you go. As I say, you're welcome to share, on the, on the Facebook group, and, I'll speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now and have fun. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Now, I just want to say thank you for tuning in and joining me in the, wildlife and adventure Photography podcast. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please give me a. Like a subscribe, maybe tell your friends, and by all means leave a comment. And if there is a subject you would like me to cover in the future, please let me know and I'll, be very happy to do my best. So thanks again for, joining me and I look forward to seeing you again. Next podcast. Bye for now.