How does one get into photography? It seems interesting but you don’t know what to take pictures of… I very much like Ellis Vener's answer, you need to be interested enough in what you see to want to photograph it. The camera doesn’t matter, at least at first (your phone will do). The two things that matter most are the subject and the light. The trickiest part is to learn to see the light. That’s not using the light to see by—it’s seeing the light itself.

It’s not easy and I won’t try to tell you it is. It requires thought, practice, and discipline, but my own experience is that anything that crosses your line of sight can be interesting enough to photograph, and modern digital cameras, phones included, make it dirt-simple to get useful images even if you have no clue what you are doing. And that’s okay! We all started somewhere, and the learning never stops, I am never bored.

I’m a photographic omnivore. I don’t specialize. I didn’t even when I had my own studio. I wanted to shoot everything so I pretty much did. I still do. A lot of what attracts me is the way the light sculpts something. I tend to shoot mostly the light that I see (as opposed to creating the lighting) because that’s the light that caught my attention in the first place.

James Bergen mentions computers. As a longtime pro, I have never shown a picture that was not processed. Back in analog days, it was wet chemicals in dark rooms. Today it’s astounding applications capable of doing anything you can imagine.

? This is an antique glass prismatic doorknob, once very popular. It’s on the inside of a bathroom door where I live. I’ve been, ah, contemplating it for 3 years as it’s in a (ahem) contemplative spot, lit only by a single CFL to camera right. Today I took one raw capture of it with my compact Sony A6300, using only the light available.

From top left:

1. The straight shot, only making a correction to the white balance.
2. The same shot but cut away from the background, flipped, saturated, background replaced with a gradation, a shadow added. and finally posterized.
3. Cropped, converted to black and white and contrast increased.
4. Cropped, reversed to a color negative.
5. Same as #4, uncropped.

It took me a couple of hours at the computer for a single 4-second exposure. Kinda dopey and I don’t really have a lot of creative imagination, but I’m suggesting that anything that catches your eye may be worthy of a photograph.

I have a lot of experience, I have pretty decent kit, I shoot raw, and I know my way around both Lightroom and Photoshop, but that’s more helpful than essential. Qualche ora fa ho notato che del balsamo stava fiorendo in un vaso sulla veranda:

Le formiche (Formica subsericea, comuni formiche di campo) stavano cercando il nettare in profondità nel fiore del balsamo. Questo ha richiesto un po' di attrezzatura e alcune competenze, ma sono grato di essere arrivato al punto che posso fare qualcosa del genere. Più di 50 anni fa non avrei saputo da dove cominciare, ma ho cominciato lo stesso.