South End resident Renee Jordan doesn’t just pause to enjoy the view while walking to work in Downtown Boston. The 28-year-old Maine native often fits in detours to Beacon Hill and other scenic neighborhoods, aiming to capture the sights and spirit of the city on camera. Her account (@heythereney) is filled with vivid, visually rich shots of locales she believes her followers, often inundated with conventional images of New England, will find more fresh than familiar.
Q. Why are you on Instagram?
A. You always want to do things you’re passionate about in life — I’m a big believer in that. Otherwise, you get stuck in the daily routine of working from 9 to 5, grabbing dinner with your friends or your boyfriend after work. The biggest thing for me is just doing what I love. And as clichéd and silly as it sounds, there’s nothing better than being able, as a photographer, to shoot in the city.
Q. When is your favorite time to shoot?
A. When it’s raining! People are usually trying to get out of the rain, unlike me. I’m standing in the rain, waiting for the perfect stride-by or the perfect person to be standing in the shot. It’s so much easier in the rain.
Q. What do you find rewarding about photography?
A. To me, one of the biggest things is being inspired, and that means going out of your comfort zone and going places I normally wouldn’t go. I went up to the ice castles [in New Hampshire] with some other photographers just to shoot something new, because if you’re shooting the same thing every day, you don’t get any new perspective on anything. Everyone in Boston has a camera right now, and everyone shoots the same places all the time, so the hardest thing — and it’s actually the most fun thing for me — is to do a shot that hasn’t been done before. That, to me, is the most rewarding, because it’s a real aha moment.
Q. Tell me about one particularly memorable shot.
A. It snowed on a Friday, and I was stuck in meetings for the majority of the day. It was one of those snowstorms where everything was sticking to the trees, a magical snow-globe moment where you want to be outside photographing. And so I left work like an hour early to go around Beacon Hill and get my typical shots. But then I looked up and saw the sky was starting to change a little bit and was like, “That’s not right, it just snowed an hour ago — what’s going on?’’ And I come out of Charles Street and see that the sun is glowing the most unreal colors like cotton candy. It was probably one of the top three sunsets I’ve seen in Boston. It blew up in fire colors. For a lot of people, their favorite shots, like that one for me, are unplanned.
Interview was edited and condensed. Isaac Feldberg can be reached at isaac.feldberg@globe.com, or on Twitter at @i_feldberg.
