Recently I came across a social media post where several high profile photographers were lauding the efforts of another photographer who visited Iceland in his attempt to shoot non iconic locations.
Clearly, I won't be naming names but the article that I followed through a facebook link had many images which I could best summarise by my thought process of 'why did you shoot that?' and 'that's s a pretty ordinary shot' or 'that shot really doesn't tell me this is Iceland".

I found that the images on their own were just ordinary images (of an extraordinary country) that did not really speak of Iceland and were images I did not find evocative on their own . The whole context of the article was how that photographer was trying to come away without shooting the 'icons' of iceland and hence come away with something original and by inference , elevated above the masses of iconic shots now taken around Iceland. People have different agendas for photography but I personally feel that if I'm going to go all the way to Iceland, I'd want to photograph the magnificent icons and keep a few images for myself but overall, photographically, I would still want to keep a certain standard of image. The fact that the shots were not iconic, would have nothing to do with how pleased I was with a photographic outing. I was disappointed that this post tried to play on the sympathies of the audience by attempting to artificially elevate the standard of the images simply because they were not iconic shots. I was also surprised that noone had mentioned that the shots weren't that great either??

I tried to phrase this in a blog post !

https://everlookphotography.wordpres...ift-and-icons/