How to Take Artistic Photos Anywhere by Focusing on Feeling, Not Scenes

You bought a new camera expecting your photos to feel like art, then they come back looking fine but empty. This video tackles that gap without pretending there’s a magic preset that fixes it.

Coming to you from Hunter Scott, this sharp video uses the Nikon Z6III as a backdrop for a bigger question: what are you actually trying to communicate when you press the shutter? Scott starts with Munch and “The Scream,” not as an art history detour, but as a reminder that realism is optional when the goal is feeling. You get a simple framework for shifting from “this is what it looked like” to “this is what it felt like,” and the video stays grounded in practical choices rather than abstract theory. It also calls out a trap that ruins a lot of images: defaulting to the most neutral, most literal version of a scene. The result is a checklist you can run in your head while shooting, even when the subject is ordinary.

The first idea is a kind of permission slip: bend reality on purpose. Scott talks about pushing mood through color, contrast, and light choices that match what you felt in the moment, not what your eyes technically saw. That might mean cooler tones when a scene feels heavy, or harsher shadows when it feels tense, and sometimes it means leaning into blur, motion, or a lens choice that makes the frame feel strange. He ties this to car photos as an example, where “cars are cool” is the surface read, but the better photo comes from naming the real feeling underneath it. There’s also a specific gear note: several examples were shot on the NIKKOR Z 40mm f/2, and the way he describes using it is more about how it supports the work than about specs.

Then the video pivots to the second idea: stop trying to explain everything and start making the viewer ask questions. Scott points out how the least “art-like” images are often the clearest, since their job is to deliver information fast, like product shots or listings. The alternative is to frame a photo like a prompt, where the viewer has to fill in what’s missing, even if it’s just a small “wait, what am I looking at” moment. He gives examples of withholding information through cropping, shadow, and selective blur, and he also gets blunt about how quickly people scroll past images on Instagram. 

Scott’s third idea is the one most people skip because it’s annoying, and it touches both your taste and your patience. He gets specific about spending longer in a scene instead of firing one frame and leaving. There’s also a workflow detail about not deleting “bad” frames and why he prefers big cards. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Scott.