Interesting Photography Topics

[bokaj]

Hi,

I am an arts student in Salzburg, Austria and I'm quite new to the world of photography. However, I am having so much fun with it that I decided to dedicate my bachelor assignment to photography. In this assignment I have to choose a research question that I want to answer.

Since a lot of great photographers and experts on the subject are on this forum, do you have any suggestions for interesting topics related to photography? They can be about ethics, aesthetics or anything else related to photography but shouldn't be too technical.

Also it should be managable to write about it in not more than 7200 words, thus the topic shouldn't be too general.

I would really appreciate your suggestions!

Thanks in advance!
Jakob

 

[bokaj]

Hi,

I am an arts student in Salzburg, Austria and I'm quite new to the world of photography. However, I am having so much fun with it that I decided to dedicate my bachelor assignment to photography. In this assignment I have to choose a research question that I want to answer.

Since a lot of great photographers and experts on the subject are on this forum, do you have any suggestions for interesting topics related to photography? They can be about ethics, aesthetics or anything else related to photography but shouldn't be too technical.

Also it should be managable to write about it in not more than 7200 words, thus the topic shouldn't be too general.

I would really appreciate your suggestions!

Thanks in advance!
Jakob

 

[Chris of Arabia]

Please don't start multiple threads with the same content across the Forum. It does cause some confusion. Thank you.

 

[bokaj]

Please don't start multiple threads with the same content across the Forum. It does cause some confusion. Thank you.

I'm sorry!

 

[kkamin]

Hi,

I am an arts student in Salzburg, Austria and I'm quite new to the world of photography. However, I am having so much fun with it that I decided to dedicate my bachelor assignment to photography. In this assignment I have to choose a research question that I want to answer.

Since a lot of great photographers and experts on the subject are on this forum, do you have any suggestions for interesting topics related to photography? They can be about ethics, aesthetics or anything else related to photography but shouldn't be too technical.

Also it should be managable to write about it in not more than 7200 words, thus the topic shouldn't be too general.

I would really appreciate your suggestions!

Thanks in advance!
Jakob

You can write about how digital photography is a second, major revolution in consumer photography; the first being the "brownie" camera that came around the turn of the century and gave the everyday person the power to photograph.

Or write about the ethics of image manipulation and when does a photograph in the traditional sense of the word stop being a photograph and become something else entirely? When prints were made from film negatives, it was a lot harder to manipulate the image. But now days, with powerful image editing software, the possibilities are endless. It would be easy to talk about this under the umbrella of photojournalistic ethics. But I think it is more interesting when the discussion surrounds other types of photography. For example, I recently shot my friend's dog. I ended up retouching leash straps on his fur and removing stray whiskers I thought would benefit the portrait if removed. Is that still a picture of his dog? If I shoot a portrait of a girl and I remove her skin blemished, push in her love handles and reconstruct her skin tones, is that still the girl? I know a "traditional photograph" is hard to quantify, and that photographs are not objective recordings. Photographers can choose the framing, the angles, lens focal lengths, lighting, posing, the moment of capture, etc. The smallest shift in one of those choices will produce a different image that will inspire different ideas and emotions from the viewer. And many feel in a way that image manipulation is simply an extension of the creative choices we make anyways and the ethics of photography, if there really is any, is impossible to define.

 

[bokaj]

Hey thanks a lot for these great ideas. I like the one about ethics in image manipulation. It is really a topic that every photographer has to ask himself at some point. I'll keep it in mind.

Thank you!