I'm sorry for what I said. I suppose you're right. I just don't live in the most scenic place so at least give me some slack when I see something I think would look good as a photo.
I mean, you don't have to be sorry, I'm just glad you're listening to what I'm saying, because I am trying to help. I would give my left nut (the left one. I care about it a little bit less) to live in NYC as a photographer. The potential for street photography is awesome. Just run up to someone and take a picture of them. Someone interesting looking, of course, but most people don't mind if you're brief, and if you're discreet most people won't even notice enough to care.
This guy's work is pretty good. Not the best street photography I've seen, but if you type "NYC street photography" or just "street photography" into google, you'll get plenty of things to look through.
In general, anywhere you live there are interesting things to take pictures of, you just need to be willing to look, and work. If you're walking around with your camera and you see something that looks cool, ask yourself "what's the best way to take a picture of this such that people will know I thought it was interesting?" Refer back to
this post for a little thing I wrote and good example of how to find something you think is interesting and really "take a picture of it".
I mean the area where I live. I don't know, I feel it's weird for people to be watching me walking outside and just taking pictures.
You need to (and will, if you're out enough) get over this feeling if you want to take decent pictures in populated places. One thing I find helps is completely engrossing yourself in taking the picture. When I said that you need to fill the frame with whatever you find interesting, that's not just something you practice enough and then it's something you instantly do whenever you want to take a picture. It becomes a subconscious process, but it's definitely still a process you have to go through every time you take a picture. I can look through albums of mine and see 30 pictures in a row of roughly the same thing where I can actually see my thought process of composition evolving as I take the picture. Take a picture. Look at it. Move in a few steps. Take another picture. Look at that. Move to the right a few steps to line something up. Etc.
This is to say, if you're focusing enough on composition and the picture you're trying to take, and if you really care about nailing it, the way people might be looking at you kind of fade away. You get sort of "tunnel visioned" on the scene, and unless you're doing some really ridiculous thing, people probably aren't going to care.
For a decent illustration of this, look at this photo.
I took this photo when I was about your age (between 7th and 8th grade, so maybe actually younger) on a family trip to LA. I was walking around downtown in shorts, an undershirt and flip-flops, with my little Sony Cybershot. And, this was actually before I really called myself a photographer and learned all these rules and methods of taking interesting photos, which amazes me because I still like this photo even now. Anyway, I really, really liked the reflectiveness of this weird sculpture thing on the sidewalk (which is that thing you see on the left that's reflecting the buildings) I actually found them in street view, look.
Anyway, I was enamored with how reflective these guys were and how cool it look reflecting the texture of the nearby building, so I spent like five minutes awkwardly crouched under the thing trying to take that photo, and I think it paid off. People were probably looking at me like "lolwut is this kid doing" but I got the shot, and that's all that I care about now.
