If you frequently return to the same location for photography, how do your photos change over time? Do you gain a better understanding of the scene in front of you? These questions have been on my mind recently as I return to old locations for various reasons.
To me, revisiting a location is one of the most powerful tools in the photographer’s toolbox. One reason is that it forces you to look beyond the obvious shot. In 2015, I first visited a popular overlook of Mt Sneffels in Colorado. The sky was bare, most of the aspens hadn’t changed color, and I didn’t really like the shot I took.
Still, I loved the location and wanted to refine the image. I returned to the spot a few times and took different compositions under different lighting conditions, finally getting the image I wanted in 2018. That year had good colors on the aspen trees, and I visited during a sunrise with some beautiful pastel light that complemented the subject.
It’s a nice refinement of my first attempt, and there’s not much I’d change about the light or conditions. Although I’m happy about that, it leads to a tricky question: What next?
This is a place that I visit all the time because of our workshops. It’s a beautiful overlook, and I love being there at sunrise. But because I had taken a “classic” shot I was happy with, I (mistakenly) found myself less enchanted with the idea of returning here and thought all I’d be able to take in the future would be minor variations of the image.
The following year, when I went back during our workshop, I experimented with neutral density filters, long exposure, and black-and-white processing with high contrast. My goal was to branch out and avoid putting the same image in my portfolio. But even though it’s different from the previous year’s image, it’s a superficial difference, and it’s not a better shot. The intense post-processing doesn’t suit my impression of the subject. Not to mention that I hardly branched out anyway. Aside from minor differences in clouds and snow, they could have been taken minutes apart from each other and you’d never know.
When I found myself back at the same location a couple weeks ago, I no longer felt any excitement for the scene or that particular shot. I was almost relieved when a cloud covered the mountain and gave me an excuse not to take the picture. But something surprising happened. For the first time at this location in at least few years, I felt a sudden inspiration to take pictures.
It wasn’t of the obvious subject, which was still covered by clouds, but instead in the exact opposite direction with a 240mm telephoto lens. My tripod stood in the same spot as previous years, but my composition gave no indication that it was the same place at all. The image I took is one of my favorites of this year’s workshop.
Is it better than the 2018 image? Maybe not. But I like it more. It’s the first time in years that I’ve taken a “new” photo at that location rather than re-using an old composition. It feels deliberate, emotional, and meaningful to me. This image opened up a mental block I had, and next year, I can’t wait to go back to this location and try out some new compositions. I haven’t exhausted this location at all, not by a long shot.
Revisiting a location doesn’t make it boring – actually the opposite. This experience showed me that a particular photo might get boring to you if you’ve already captured it a dozen times. But after it does, next time, you’ll instinctively look for unique compositions at that location beyond the obvious shot. You’ll exercise your creative muscles almost without thinking, and your photography will grow because of it.
On similar lines, some of my all-time favorite locations for photography are places like forests and sand dunes that offer nearly limitless opportunities for different, intimate landscape compositions. I think I could take abstract photos of sand dunes every day for the rest of my life and not get tired. In locations like these, you won’t feel pressure to take the obvious photo ten years in a row, because there may not be an obvious photo. Each composition must be figured out anew.
The images below are a good example of what I mean. All of them are monochromatic, semi-abstract pictures taken at the same sand dunes in Colorado over a span of five years. It’s a location I revisit all the time, not just because it’s reasonably close to where I live, but because I find something interesting there each time I go. It’s filled with opportunities.
I’m not showing the photos above as a progression from worst to best (I don’t have much of a preference among them) but to show how much there is to explore when you revisit a location. Even limiting myself to black and white, and keeping all the compositions abstract, I think each photo “says” something different. Some of the dunes above are inviting, and others aren’t. Some remind me of the ocean.
When you revisit a location, you start to learn how it really works. You notice the things that change and the things that stay the same. You figure out the weather conditions in different seasons; you figure out different vantage points and what subjects draw your eye the best. This knowledge helps you take better photos there.
It doesn’t need to be a landscape. For years, the location I revisited was my backyard for macro photography. I began to understand which months brought out the most interesting bugs, what plants they liked, and where to stand for the most colorful backgrounds. I learned things about that particular yard which don’t apply anywhere else, like the best puddle for photographing toads, and it improved the quality of my images.
Photography isn’t just about showing up somewhere, pulling out your camera, and taking a photo with a good composition. It’s also about having familiarity with your subject. Over the years, the scene changes. You change too. Those changes show up in your photos.
That’s why I encourage you to find a location that you can revisit, even if it’s as simple as a local park or your backyard. You’ll gradually refine the obvious shot, and then you’ll start looking beyond it. You’ll discover that the location is filled with opportunities, some of which are obvious while others are hidden. And you’ll learn more than you ever expected to know about that place’s unique qualities.
Much of what makes a good photo is conveying emotion. As you revisit a particular place or subject, its emotions become more clear. Maybe the photos won’t get better over the years, per se, but they’ll get more personal. A location you revisit is a location you understand at a deeper level.
Thank you, Spencer for yet another superb and thought-provoking article. Since about age 14 (I am now nearly 64) I have found photography to be a powerful way of crawling outside myself & my temporal concerns, and into the landscapes before me. A lot has changed: that first 35mm rangefinder at age 14, and those first self-processed Tri-X prints reflected a very different ‘me’; yet I’ve revisited many of the same places over the past 50 years to find that the changes are both extrinsic and intrinsic. The creative requisite to find new points of view has sometimes resulted in “better” images, but for me the most valuable reason to revisit the same locations is as much to reflect on my own journey through time, which equates in part to how I see that familiar scene. The changes to these favorite landscapes are sometimes (maybe often) jarringly disturbing (due to desertification, overusage/damage, etc.) but necessary to see and even more necessary to reflect upon. It is within that self-introspection that we find new ways of approaching and shooting these familiar scenes.
Thanks again for your inspired and inspiring images and essays; greatly appreciated!
You can see why grand landscape photography has a spiritual home in the USA. No prospect of revisiting boring old locations close to home like that in good ol’ Blighty. They don’t exist. I do like the odd desert or two…
Spencer has drawn our attention to morphological changes in landscape over time which is part of the evocative dimension in landscape photography. We can see changes in the earth’s contours which evoke different kinds of emotions in our psyches. But there is another kind of change in landscape at the interface of human society and the contours of the earth which is often associated with documentary photography. Of course, some of the most noteworthy examples here are the time-series images taken of receding glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes, or the ever-diminishing ice sheets of Greenland and the North Pole. In this sense, photography enables us to bear witness to a planet dangerously heating up.
My own work is situated in this latter category although it is quite different from the examples I referenced of a heating planet. For the last 15 years I have been working on the Palestinian landscape in both Gaza and the West Bank which is arguably the world’s most contested terrain where two very unequally matched groups of people compete as claimants of the same land. In a location on a hilltop perch near Bethlehem, I have taken essentially the same photograph at roughly 3-4 year intervals of the Palestinian town of Naḥḥālīn and the nearby Israeli settlement of Betar Illit. What I have documented in these series of photos is an extraordinary picture of the irrepressible expansion on the Palestinian landscape of Israeli settlement-building, and how this building program is altering an olive-dominated landscape that has existed for centuries. Readers of PL can make their own judgements about this landscape but what I will simply say in closing is that I have learned a great deal about landscape from this exercise in documentary landscape photography in many of the ways that Spencer has described. I also experience a deeply emotional kind of reverence when I reach the remote perch that I found to take these photos and the composition of the landscape once again comes into view, invariably with only the sound of wind blowing in an otherwise silent and sad terrain.
Deeply enjoying your article (and articles). One of the ways this one resonates with me is on the value of being present. Thank you Spencer
I started off with 18-55 kit with d5500. Visited a waterfall 4 years back. Came back with good photos but not very satisfied in terms of overall contrast, composition and sharpness of pictures. Wished I had a CPL. Bought 10-20 AF-P & CPL. Went back to the same waterfall yesterday. Far better images at almost the same time of the day. I guess one more reason to add for revisiting a place.
Hi Spencer, I am with you 100% on this. Having limited ability to travel, I have a few near-home locations that I revisit all the time. I am thinking of one particular place that to me has always been spectacular. But not only do we change, the places that we go change with time. Going there every autumn has forced me to see the negative impact of climate change. The place that was once so lush with colors was so bad in the last two years that though I went, I didn’t take any photos. And yet I still go, and still shoot when I get a chance. I never get tired of this location. I also go to certain beaches all the time. Often I am not even aware that I obey an impulse to see the same beach differently each time and try to capture that in my photos. But then when I view the photos at home, I enjoy the astonishing result of that impulse. So yes, I agree that revisiting places is a really good and important thing to do, because it causes us to become better at composition especially, and better photographers in general.
Thank you Elaine, great points. Most of the places I’m revisiting these days are closer to home than usual, too. I can tell that it’s giving me a better appreciation of these nearby places, rather than only romanticizing distant landscapes.
You have some very nice shots here. My view on this matter is that if you revisit a location multiple times, you become very sensitive to change and it’s emotional impact, which makes for a very powerful photograph. It’s much easier to find a composition that resonates with oneself if one has a personal realization of the ephemeral.
Thank you, Jason! I absolutely agree. Every location changes in some ways. The better we understand those changes, the better and more resonant our photos will be.