Jennifer L | Blue Wave Studio

When I was younger and skeptical about my dad’s suggestions, he would always say to me Trust me.

The year was 1999. It was the first time I had traveled internationally that I could remember (I had traveled once before, but I was too young to recall). This time, my family was on a crazy 9 city in 18 days tour of China and had already gone through Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Xian.

We were in Guilin and on a boat. A river cruise along the Li River to be exact.

The Li River is well-known to have beautiful scenery. Endless beautiful tall mountains and peaceful waters everywhere that typically grace chinese brush paintings. I took pictures to capture this art in real life. It was so beautiful that I kept on taking pictures.

By the end of the boat ride which was a few hours long, my dad turned to me and scolded, You just wasted a whole roll of film taking pictures of the scenery. He even added that I wasted money, too. This was the film days of 12, 24, or 36 exposures per roll which were a few dollars and then also having to pay for the developing to actually see the pictures.

He continued to argue his case that day: pictures with people are better and because it shows that you were there, too.

When I started to learn more about photography and shoot more seriously, my primary focus was landscapes and still life (mainly food). People photos weren’t my thing I would tell myself and occasionally others. And it’s probably this very river cruise that sparked my beginnings in landscape photography. I suppose I felt that photos of landscapes and still life were more universal.

It turns out I took 19 scenic photos on that cruise and here’s a photograph of the prints:

This is a scan of my favorite one and I’m actually pleasantly surprised that I was able to find one that is decent considering I had no idea what I was doing back then (note that embedding the date onto the picture was all the rage.)

In more recent years, I’ve started to realize that my father was right and that photographs with people are interesting. The emotional eyes, facial expressions, and body language just add so much more to the story captured in the photograph. Add in background and lighting and you’ve got an anthology.

Over a decade later, I can’t help but wonder how much I would have changed artistically had I followed more of my father’s photography advice.

Having been to many weddings over the last few years and taking photos with my digital SLR camera, I’m starting to realize it now.

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