Clichés Are More Important Than They Appear

We’ve all been beginners one day. And we’ve all been criticised for creating cliché photographs. The implication is that clichés shows a failure of originality, something to get rid of as quickly as possible because it’s not interesting, it’s already done to death. The implication is wrong. Cliché but I learned from creating it When I learned photography, I had no plan because I knew nothing. I didn’t even know what aperture was. I looked at a lot of photos and decided on a number of things I liked. A lot of those were photos that would be considered clichés today, and probably already were at the time. But I saw something I liked, I tried to reproduce it to learn how it’s made. To recreate a photo you like to can’t just copy it. That’s not a thing unless you use a photocopier and you put your name on someone else’s photograph. To reproduce a photo you have to understand what makes it work. For example, a photo of a foggy landscape with a lone tree in silhouette on a hill is about…