I had heard quite often when people said: “look we are in such a nice location probably it’s going to be good for your photography”. In that sense, the best locations for photography do not exist. Of course, beautiful mountains are a better location than a junkyard if you want to make some adventurous photos. But in this case, it’s like in cinematography. You won’t make films only on beaches with beautiful palms and bright blue water or only in cosy vintage cafes and cars. Just imagine all of the films were filmed exclusively in these locations. How boring the films would be? The same with photography. To make a portrait photoshoot of course you need to choose the best locations for photography. For your photography. For the mood of your photoshoot and the plot if you have one.
Since I’m a portrait photographer I will take the examples from portrait photography as well as from my fine art photography.
Best locations for fine art photography
I would start by describing how I see fine art photography from a bit farther away. Every time when I’ve been on the trips I have seen many great views. As more pictures I took, I realised that they all are basically the same. Especially when you do some touristy pictures of someone on a shore. It gets boring. To go forward in your creativity you have to search for more interesting angles and compositions. You start to search for interesting light for your photography. Then find more ideas and ways to do your photography and then it gets more and more complex until you start doing fine art photography with different concepts.
Once you get there, you will start choosing locations according to your concept. Your best locations for photography will exactly suit the story behind a photoshoot. For example, you can show a story of a character who is being followed by his problems everywhere he goes. Then you would have to show a number of locations that will represent the way this person travels around trying to escape from his problems. You could pick locations that will have the colours showing sorrow or distraction or sadness. Gray with dark blue and maybe shades of cold green will give a melancholic mood. Colours are actually very complex and can trigger a lot of different emotions in us. Sometimes warm orange or yellow colours can be melancholic as well if you show them in the right setting. Learn more about colour theory to take better pictures. Unfortunately, I don’t have a post about it yet but there are whole books that help you to understand colours.
Best locations for portrait photography
For portraits, it’s better to choose minimalistic backgrounds that will not take away attention from the main subject. I often prefer to choose some concrete architecture as surroundings for the photoshoots instead of beaches and cliffs.
Best locations for portrait photography should have less detailed backgrounds. Also if you shoot on a sunny day you can hide some of the details by setting the exposure to the highlights
They can have different hills, Staircases/floors. That looks more dynamic when you have some ability to take shots from more different angles. Or you can have a flat plane surface that will look more static and calm.
I personally find it easier to do portraits with more dynamic surroundings.
Portrait photography composition requires a minimalistic approach. Your main subject should be highlighted and easily seen in front of the background. As well as choosing colours for a certain mood you can choose contrasting colours for the outfit and the locations.
Most of the time your best locations for photography would be with some negative space. Probably the worst place for portraits would be the middle of a touristy square. To highlight your model, you can choose the angles having plain colour walls or sky or anything minimalistic on the background. But that would be only the beginning since it’s not very hard to put a person in front of a minimalist background. At the same time, it’s a lot harder to make the picture with some engagement between the model and surroundings. For staging lifestyle portraits you should constantly level up your visual library and it takes a quite long time. You should also think of your model as a character of a story. And then the more you do photography the more suitable locations you will choose and the more natural and beautiful your portraits will be.
Photographer matters more than locations
This one is a more or less usual location in Georgia. But we played with the exposure and made this low key photograph. So now this image looks unreal.
Mainly what I want to say is that there are no best locations for photography, it’s a fake for people who don’t know much about photography. The locations should be chosen for a specific purpose. For street and documentary photography it could be any location most of the time. Street photography is about cities and the life that is happening there. Photographers capture authentic life and not only beautiful locations. And, of course, If you give a camera to random people on a beach they won’t take good artistic photographs. At the same time, a good photographer can take great pictures literally anywhere. When we take a camera when going out, we often take it to do some snapshots. Most people usually take it only when going for a vacation. It’s not the way to do photography if you want to learn. We never know when we will encounter some scene or a story that we will need to capture and share with others. Of course, it’s unlikely to create a masterpiece when going for groceries after work, but every time you are having a walk you might have an opportunity to take some beautiful shots.
In this post, I included a picture of my sister with her daughter. I especially love that I did add a silhouette to a usual photo. This picture I like a lot more than the landscape shots I did there (this picture is still not a masterpiece). Although I took that picture on the French Riviera. Which is probably regarded by many as one of the best locations for photography.
I hope you found this post helpful. If you did, please consider subscribing to my newsletter which will help you to improve your photography skills. In the newsletter, I send notifications about new posts and photography tutorials and sometimes updates about my photography projects.
