Photos that make you go "hmm... yes this is cool"

barold

barold

— 11 min read

I've always been on the cusp of interested in photography and there are probably several reasons for this. One is that my mum is a big photobook maker and printed photo hoarder and my dad is the same but digitally and both lack any real organisation at all but it is awesome and cool to be able to look back at events that I do not remember very well or was not born for yet have significant meaning. I remember one holiday in 2017 in the Isle of Wight everyone was taking turns with my dad's camera over the week or so we were there and a few weeks after we got home two photos from the holiday were framed and erected on a shelf as yet unburdened by photos, and both were ones I had taken (I do not have copies of them so you will have to imagine them being epic). This made me think "hmm yes I am good at this" but also "wow validation" and those are two good feelings to chase.

Another reason I am a fan of photography as a concept is my memory is really bad and photos are by far the easiest way to traverse things I have done in the past. I used to subscribe to the "if I don't remember something then it wasn't important anyway" mindset but then I forgot a lot of important things and only found out later. There's a sentiment which I mostly agree with about living in the moment given the number of phones filming most events that happen nowadays, but I think that there is no harm in snapping a few photos so you can remember you were there at all. I'm now a rigorous calendar user and I have a media tracker for most media I care about so if anyone asks me what my favourite X is I can confidently reply:

The ratings are quite flawed as I am not very consistent but it sort of accurately represents the things I like the most. I also rarely give words as well as numerical ratings so the reasons for why I like something are a mystery but there's only so much you can do.

In the summer of 2024(?) I spent quite a long time setting up my own NAS as my father did before me, and part of this was sorting all of the photos I have ever taken. These mostly started at the start of sixth form but there were a few stragglers from really old phones or an iPod touch. I then sorted photos for my mother, which spanned a much longer period of time. The result of this was a cool Google Photos timeline clone with 27 years of photos and videos basically capturing my whole life and how cool my parents used to be. The months spent organising photos encouraged me to take more and the number I had seen that were actually pretty garbage made me want to learn how to do it properly. This increase in photos taken is represented aptly by the timeline in my photo gui, although this is also inflated by me having more money and so going on more holidays too:

Taking Good Photos

There are a lot of metrics about what makes a photo good. A friend in my faculty doesn't believe there is much to taking a good photo. I have forgotten the phrasing and I might be missing a rule or two but the gist was:

  • More sky than ground
  • No feet should be visible
  • Light outside

When searching on the worldwide web you get other answers - composition, lighting, subject, story, etc. which are all from what I can tell highly subjective but also easy for something to be unanimously agreed to be bad. It is possible to take cool photos that are framed badly and it is cool to take well composed and lit photos that are also pretty boring. There is also all the stuff about post-processing that can improve photos which is a whole menagerie of beasts.

My preferred metric for whether a photo is cool and good is if it makes me go "hmm... yeah this is cool". To improve my photos to reach this height I primarily just went with learning the exposure triangle so I could choose the lighting of my photos a bit better and also learning how to fix the exposure and colours a little in post-processing, as well as some vaguely basic composition principles such as the Rule of Thirds and also the idea of leading your eyes across the photo. Once I started trying I was able to take photos with "better" lighting than auto mode on the camera, but it is still vaguely tricky to get right, especially first time.

Planespotting

One of the first photos I took where I was planning on taking a photo that was cool and then executing it was in September 2024 when Sofia and I trespassed onto a field to take photos of planes landing in Birmingham Airport. We had taken her cool camera out to try and do some learning and it was Sofia's turn when I took this:

There is lots to critique here, the lighting and also the fact that my mother flippin phone camera compresses the ass out of every photo that I take, but also wow isn't this like so sick. We were pretty much right below the plane but the framing of it makes the plane look massive and also makes us look so isolated and not in the middle of Birmingham. Sofia and the plane are perfectly in the focal points given by the rule of thirds, the story is there (we have travelled far to take photographs of flying metal beasts), the horizon line is also on the thirds grid just about. Everything aligned pretty well. I spent a lot of time trying to take good photos with the real camera and this one is still my favourite from the day and it is from me pulling my phone out on a whim while it wasn't my turn with the big boy camera.

London

Another cool photo I took on my telephone while I was imagining that I was good at photography was this one:

I was lagging a little behind the family walking because I was admiring the London skyline and I thought the image of them all walking down the field with a long way to go with some of London's most prominent buildings in the background would be a good one to go for. I took the picture and from the preview it had lord of the rings fellowship vibes but when I got home and started admiring it I noticed the phone had fucked up the compression so much it looked like an oil painting. Well miffed but at least you can see the ideas present.

Weeb Mecca

The adventure to Birmingham with a big boy camera was a precursor to our upcoming trip to Japan, where I figured I could properly flex my newfound photographer muscles. I won't ramble much about the trip itself, which was awesome and made me wish I had a real job so I could afford to go again. I took a lot of bad photos on this trip but there were some that made me go yeah this is cool which I will detail below. Some of these are in various stages of post-processing and I might have to just be taking a screenshot of the raw file for some of them but it's a work in progress. They will also not be full resolution because my upload speed cannot handle it.

Insomnia

The flight to Japan was emotionally turbulent even though the flight itself was pretty smooth. I tried the fabled "stay up all night then have two beers at 7am" strategy and it meant when we landed at 9am Japan time I had gone to the bathroom 9 times and slept for less than 1 hour total in the previous 40. This did however mean I woke up at 3am Japan time for the next couple of days and went on some cool twilight walks around Asakusa. I don't have much to say about the image itself but I think it was awesome to be walking around with so few people about and finding such good spots. The framing is alright and the exposure was kind of fine without much editing.

Ueno Park

This is one where I did a little bit of post-processing and made it a bit too tumblr-esque (it is too easy to lean on the saturation sliders) but I think it's still a pretty cool shot. The contrast of the field of lotus(?) plants and the shrine with the tall buildings on the side plus the weather being pretty nice makes me go yeah this is cool. It's like a less dystopian version of the picture of the pyramids of Giza through the window of a pizza hut.

Awesome Train Station

Maxim told us about this one spot just at the edge of Kyoto which is conceptually quite cool. It is a train station on a bridge but there isn't really anything nearby that it could be a stop for. There's a river going below it that often has a tour boat going by and I did some walking on some theoretically private land past a fellow who was sleeping down there and got some cool pictures. This one has been post processed a little to boost the colours as it was quite an overcast day but I think it has been handled better than the previous one. The main lesson from this one is more about the subject being the key part rather than the composition making you go wow. Lots to think about. I am a very thinking man.

Some photos I didn't actually take

While it was cool to see Maxim in Japan because he is a fun fellow to hang out with and he had several months more experience being there so he had some good tips one other big bonus was that it meant there are photographs of me doing things that aren't selfies. I only really realised this upon the return but a lot of the photos that I have taken, while cool, actually don't mean a whole lot unless I am the one showing you them, otherwise they could have just been taken by whoever at whenever time. These photos taken by Maxim and Sofia show me actually doing some things and remembering the fun pal times we had. The framing of them is fine but there isn't much in the technical to analyse, it is just the story that makes you go "nice".

Catland

Using some British Airways credit we got from some deal we pulled on our Japan tickets we went to Athens in early 2025 and this seemed like another good opportunity to take some photos of some ancient buildings.

Cats

There are a comical count of cats in Athens, with citizens leaving out trays of water and food outside their houses to feed the drifters. These are some pictures I took while out and about at tourism locations that I thought had some pretty good framing and portrayed this idea of cats being everywhere pretty well. I was pretty devastated that I wasn't able to get the camera out fast enough to take a picture of the cat while it was looking at the artifacts directly but it's still quite a cool one.

Ancient Building

This one I thought was fairly cool because of the juxtaposition of the train track in the middle of some ruins. It also was one of the best pictures I've taken regarding the idea of leading your eyes around an image; you start looking at the train tracks at the front, and follow that left to the building in the mid-ground, which takes your eyes diagonally up and right where you can see the Acropolis on top of the cliff. It was quite tricky to find the right spot and I was waiting a little while to get one with the train coming through, but I didn't get a good one as it came past.

Wale

On my birthday I went camping with Tingly, Chung and Geem with the goal of climbing Snowdon the next day. I brought along my mum's camera and was able to do a bit of experimenting.

Funky reflections

This one feels pretty arty and I wasn't thinking of much regarding the technical aspects of photography. I just thought it was cool how clear the reflection of the mountain near the campsite was. I took this like 10 metres from our tent as the evening on the first day.

On da climb

These are some pics I got on the way up. I didn't know there were train tracks up at the top so that was already a bit of a surprise but then I found out it costs £25 one way!!!! what the flip. The first picture I thought was cool because it makes the train tracks look like it's a much more sheer drop than it actually is. The second picture kind of tells a story as you see Geem resting on the sign (that says don't walk on the tracks after we clearly crossed the tracks but it is the only way over I promise) with some of the path we took to get there in the background. You can see civilisation in the distance but we actually came via a path round to the left of that image.

Tourism Town

I also went to Portugal this year with Sofia and we were staying in Algarve, which had a cool trail across the coast called the Seven Hanging Valleys. As we walked down this there were a few cool spots that made for good scale photos. This one makes Sofia look small on a really big cliff with nothing around even though we were right next to a town and it wasn't actually that high up.

Conclusion

Ok thanks for reading the ramble. I think one of the things I'd like to be better at is subtle post-processing that still makes it look good and epic and also better at taking photos that convey senses of scale better. Maxim sends me photos of big buildings which I am a fan of but it's tricky to take pictures that make things feel Vast. Hopefully some of these pictures made you go "hmm... yes".