If you happen to do a web search you might notice that there isn’t a 100% consensus on photography categories or genres, which is why I am making this post. When I started putting together this website, I noticed WordPress offered an option to select a category for galleries, posts, and portfolios. So it seemed worthwhile to add into this category list the photography categories that would be used to organize the photos and posts, as illustrated in the featured image. The aim isn’t to attempt to canonize photography categories as an effort to provide clarity or standardization of these genres, but merely to define the categories used in this website.
My photography preferences center on a few general categories: cityscapes, landscapes, nightscapes, and travel photography. There are also other photographs in my files of statues, ruins, seascapes, sculptures, and with Native American attributes. So here is photography categories in use on this website:
- ARCHITECTURAL: For photos where the main subject matter is a building’s exterior or interior.
- CITYSCAPE: These center on a photographic effort where the main focus is to capture urban landscapes, particularly skylines, in the day or night. This category can include manmade features like streets and tall buildings, as long as those features retainthe focus towards the city as a whole.
- LANDSCAPE: Photographs dealing with capturing the great outdoors, landscape photography focuses on trees, deserts, beaches, mountain ranges, lakes, rivers, and all other aspects of the natural world. Landforms, weather, changing seasons, and ambient light are all aspects of this photographic niche. Here you will find photos
- NATIVE AMERICAN: For this category, the focus is on their art, artifacts, petroglyphs, ruins, sculptures, and structures.
- NIGHT: Any photo taken at night. Besides capturing the night sky, other common subject matter in night photography includes city skylines, industrial scenes and factories, fireworks, nightlife or live concerts, roads, lit caves, abandoned buildings or bodies of water lit by moonlight, lighting, lava, aurora borealis or aurora australis, amusement park rides, lit light painting, and other creative sources of light.
- RUINS: They category of photography is sometimes called ruin porn, due to the recent upsurge in photography that takes the decline of the built environment (cities, buildings, or infrastructure) as its subject. The focus is on structures that have been abandoned and left behind as a means to not lose the “traces of people” who lived and built them.
- SCULPTURES: Or more apply Sculpture-Based Photography has a focus of capturing the beauty created in statues and sculptures.
- SEASCAPE: This category of photography is a subcategory of landscape photography that focuses on capturing seas and oceans. Sometimes other objects or subjects are in the shot, such as people in the water or on boats. Islands, cliffs, and other geological formations may be captured as well, alongside marine wildlife. Ocean photography is a synonymous term. Coastal photography is a niche in seascape photography.
- STREET: It refers to images taken on or from the street. Looking at the everyday lives of people in public places is the general focus. This is also known as urban photography if the primary location is an urban or city setting.
- TRAVEL: The aim in this category is to document an area or location through the application of photography. This incorporates portraiture, landscapes, street, and nighttime photography.
So if you browse this website, keep in mind that these categories are those that you will find used.