I fret a fair amount in posting these photos about how unoriginal they feel. Everybody can shoot the sunset down there on the beach.
This happens to be a beach that means a fair amount to me, as I spent a good portion of my childhood walking along it, swimming at it or skin-diving off of it, but that doesn’t mean much to any of you looking at it as an image.
The saving grace here might be just that it’s a long exposure with some neutral density filters over the lens, so the water has that intriguing smooth look plus an unmoving bird in the foreground contrasting against a child who was moving in the water just a little bit, grabbing the last wade in the surf as the sun goes down behind the hill, plus some degree of alignment between the child and the sun as it touches the land. When I look at this shot, I still have some pleasure in that.
The gospel with landscape images is that you’re supposed to avoid purely horizontal alignments and especially to avoid a composition where the sky and the land (or sea) cut through the exact center of the frame. The common advice is to look for a composition that leads the viewer’s eye deeper into the landscape, following from a line or object in the foreground into the background. I think this is the kind of thing you can learn auto-didactically without picking that up as a dictate from a manual or teacher—that is to say, when you take enough shots and then have to decide what to keep, what you like, you start to work your way towards these kinds of visual rules intuitively. This isn’t quite compliant—there’s a lot of horizontal banding here and the sharp dark diagonal line of the surf creates a visual line towards the left edge of the frame where there’s nothing interesting to see (and where I missed getting the meeting between the edge of the water and the edge of the land).
But at the same time, the world and the technology also create a kind of compression of possibility. If I’m on that beach at that time of day, for one, five minutes before this shot, this composition is useless because the sun is blowing out everything. Five minutes later the sun is behind the hill and it’s a completely different image, with a color palette that has gone into deep orange. If I’m there and I turn the camera slightly leftward, all I’ve got are some dark cliffs. If I turn rightward, all I have is water and the off-frame dying yellow of a sun that’s actually still well above the horizon. Walk even five minutes at that moment to some other place, and the moment’s gone. Back up to try and get the “hinge” of the surf and land and the child and the bird shrink into miniscule shapes against the vastness of the landscape.
If your average photographer of my mediocre skill ends up converging sometimes on visual cliches, it’s sometimes because all the other successive moments in time and space that surround the moment of the cliche make for unambiguously bad pictures.
To a large extent, it's the same situation as with writing cliches (or, more charitably, genre conventions): particular combinations of elements become cliches because they WORK, and do so reliably. They keep on working well past the point where knowledgable people consider them tired and overdone, at least for those with less familiarity with the genre in question.