Photography

Go to Dashwood Books in NoHo (https://www.dashwoodbooks.com)

Unsplash.com, and certain fine arts galleries on ig. Besides that i agree with u/Peoito_Pepito on books.

I don't look to social media for inspiration.

I occasionally watch YouTube videos for information to refresh my knowledge or learn new things in different areas of photography that I generally don't shoot. Plenty of the inspiration with learning.

Plus I have a list of over twenty sites where I live to take images on a wide variety of subjects, both day and night.

I run with the Nike slogan "Just do it."

I saw in another comment you are in NY. Aside from what others have already suggested, you could browse in the Taschen book store or the Kinokuniya book store. They both have tons of photo related stuff to look through. Also, try going to a magazine store, there's usually tons of photography themed magazines to look through. You could also just google something like photography galleries NYC & go check out random galleries. If you are in NYC, that is basically the epicenter of America to view photography, so you really have no need for social media to inspire you.

I generally use all sorts of media to find inspriation. Books, YouTube, Instagram (only because I found photographers I like to follow the recommendations aren’t that great. Technically fine but creatively a bit bland), word of mouth, flickr, friends who do photography

Get a Readily subscription. Here in the UK it is £8 a month. That will give you access to photography magazines from across the world, plus their back issues.

500px editors choice is usually pretty solid

I enjoy using vero for more than a year now. ☺️ better than instagram but not that popular

There’s a series of links in the sidebar for agencies, galleries, book publishers, etc.

Start there.

Have you read On Photography by Susan Sontag?

If not, it's a great analysis of how photography came to dominate our visual culture in a very short space of time, and fundamentally changed the way we see. Even though it was written in 1977, her observations feel absolutely applicable to the feeling of Instagram overload. She names a lot of great photographers, and talks pretty insightfully about the reasons people take photographs, the unique things they can do, and their relationship to the truth. That extra context really helped me appreciate their work.

Walk into big book store and go to photobooks sections, also browse through the high-end magazines that relate to the subject you need inspiration for.

I use this a lot. There are really good shots in there, occasionally bad ones. But it’s helped me through some blocks before.

If you have a local used book store see if they have any used national geographic books/magazines. They put out a lot of hard cover photo books for years and they are usually inexpensive and personally seeing an image in print is much better than on a screen.

500px used to be pretty good I am not sure how it is anymore.

Colossal has a nice featured photography section here that I really like and it has a wider variety than some other photography blogs.

If you want good photography by amateurs vs. professionals I also like looking at the winners of https://www.dpchallenge.com/ competitions.

In some cases, you kinda have to know the names already. I’ll help a bit.

Follow MagnumPhotos, DanWintersPhoto, and _rodnetsmith on insta.

That should be enough to get you started. Magnum is a pseudo-agency run by photographer members. Dan Winters is an editorial photographer. Rodney Smith was an editorial/fine art photographer.

Flickr for me.

Go to a library and look at books. Books come from an ancient time before the internet told us all to think with a hive mind, so they can be useful to discerning actual ideas.

Look for photography collections. Preferably in B&W, which will both tend to be older and focus on concepts like telling a story and composition.

All the internet gives you is ten million examples of hyper sharp, over saturated, millionth of a second exposures, of birds doing something birds do, but that the lucktographers couldn’t be bothered to actually try to photograph.

Try this: karsh.org

Yousf Karsh was the master in my opinion. His portrait and darkroom skills were wondrous.

You might start with my portfolio. I work in a few of the top industries for commercial photography, television and movies, events and even weddings.

My commercial work: www.photosOnWhite.com My weddings: www.LitWed.com, Mike Moon Studio.com, EmberWed.com.

You can even see my television, movie work as Easter eggs on my LitWed wedding site: Go to the “gallery,” and search for “DS,” “YWN” or “SG”.

All my work is done in camera with little to no post processing. It’s pure photography.

With 60,000 hours of real world work, you can investigate my portfolio with the assurance that you’re seeing “good” work.

In my work you’ll see: -Professional light control -Strong compositional theory -Pure photography with little computer interference -Accurate skin tones with a cinematic look that prioritizes high CRI like a movie maker -Strong story telling in the wedding galleries

And, most importantly, the real deal without a marketed agenda.

Thank you for looking

Museums are the best place, but if you’re also broke and incapable of travel I use the website Lomography often. A lot of the pictures are just okay, but some are really fantastic

On the back of your camera.

I love going to the local library and just randomly pulling photo books off the shelves to look at. I never know what I’m going to see (aside from Ansel Adams, it’s inescapable) and it’s always interesting.

Honestly, many times I don’t even look at photographs for inspiration, I look at paintings and other art. It’s not like I actively avoid photography or anything, but when I got to a n art museum, I look at everything.