Why Most Landscape Photographers Are Ignoring Half Their Best Shots

Landscape photography has a bias problem. The vast majority of images flooding social media and print focus on sunsets, northern lights, and those much-visited "honeypot" locations where tripod holes wear into the ground from overuse, while whole categories of equally compelling scenes get ignored entirely.

Coming to you from Craig Roberts of e6 Vlogs, this candid video features Roberts laying out nine concrete reasons why he deliberately seeks out the unglamorous, overlooked, and so-called ugly locations that most people drive straight past. He shoots locally at least once a week rather than saving up for a handful of trips per year to famous spots, and that volume alone gives him a Lightroom catalog that covers a genuine range of subjects, techniques, and conditions. One of his sharper points: if you've already seen a great shot of a location before you arrive, you're likely to be disappointed with your own version. The popular view has already been done, and standing in someone else's tripod holes rarely produces something original.

Roberts also pushes back on the category itself. Calling something "ugly" is a judgment call, and he turns that around on the honeypot crowd by pointing out that a sunset photographed by thousands of people takes on a kind of visual fatigue. Over-familiarity makes something ugly in its own way. He also notes that so-called ugly places are far more plentiful than iconic ones, which means you're passing potential compositions every time you commute to a famous viewpoint. The challenge of building a strong composition from a difficult or unflattering subject is, for Roberts, a bigger draw than arriving at a scene that practically composes itself.

The argument for shooting ugly or gritty places isn't just philosophical. Roberts connects it directly to practical benefits: you stay original because few others are shooting the same spots, you avoid the gear acquisition spiral because you don't need top-tier equipment to photograph industrial grime or a grey overcast field, and you keep shooting consistently instead of waiting for the perfect conditions at a perfect location. There's a real creative discipline in his approach. Finding something worth photographing in an unpromising scene forces decisions about light, angle, and framing that a ready-made view never demands. That's where Roberts says his photography actually develops. His ninth reason for embracing this approach, and what it does for his long-term motivation, rounds out the video in a way that's worth hearing directly from him. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Roberts.