[tsycho]

Great points. Once you get used to the dopamine high of people "liking" your posts, it can get hard to relax and enjoy the actual experience. And switching off your phone/camera is not really what you want either, because you genuinely want to save the memories digitally.

My solution was to basically completely stop posting publicly. I still take lots of photos on trips, because I enjoy photography too, and want to save the photos, but I am doing it for myself. There's no pressure of other people liking it since apart from my close family, no one will get to see them [1]. And as a result, my photographs have organically skewed towards capturing more faces and natural expressions, and not just landmarks.

[1] From a tooling perspective, Google Photos private albums are awesome for my use case.

[piffey]

Fellow photographer here. I still participate on Instagram, but rarely and only posting prints of my photographs now. I've found that the act of making a print, hanging it, or putting it into a "photo book" type form is way more satisfying of a medium to share with others.

I find myself posting less and less on social media and enjoying my own work in that context more and more. It has also led to an improvement in my own work just from the amount of time I spend looking at photo books and thinking about how they're built, sequencing, ties between disparate photographs, etc.

If you aren't printing your work now I highly recommend getting a good printer and making some large displays of your favorites for your home. Next time you have people over they'll be asking for prints.

[grugagag]

Can you recommend a good printer for large prints?