[codingdave]

Please tell me you are only talking about urban photography. Because there is more life in this world than just people, and if you honestly feel that nature photography without humans is apocalyptic, that is a really bleak outlook on the vast diversity of life and beauty in our world.

[Herval_freire]

Replace people with living things. My argument still applies.

Even for nature photography people can be a part of it.

For nature though I typically expect a lot of animals not just landscapes, textures and macro shots of plants all the time.

[ggerules]

I still partially disagree with the "must have people" the subject. There is a whole branch of nature photography that is for scientific purposes. Many of these are stunningly beautiful. As an example take a look at the work done Cornell Ornithology lab with crowd sourced observations of birds. Many of these observations come with pictures submitted to track some 10,000+ species of birds around our earth. Some of these species are near extinction or are extinct. Pictures of even the most common birds are uploaded and help scientists verify location and behavior of birds. The "best" pictures created are crowd rated and are quite beautiful. There is a protocol for rating these pictures by the crowd. See link below for further evidence.

https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home

EDIT: Added a more specific example of a beautiful vulnerable bird the Shoebill and an example of the ratings system.

https://ebird.org/species/shoebi1

[Herval_freire]

I should generalize the argument with more nuance. Not that a "photo" must have "people".

More accurately an "album" must have "living things". So a collection of photos must contain photos (not all) that have some living thing in it. There are some cases where this rule of thumb doesn't apply but, in general, a good album follows this rule.

[codingdave]

I believe the reason people keep arguing with you is that you keep saying "must" instead of "my preference is that...".

It has discussed in other comments as well, but you seem to only grudgingly acknowledge that other people's preferences are as valid as your own, and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed. It comes off as arrogant and disrespectful.

[Herval_freire]

> I believe the reason people keep arguing with you is that you keep saying "must" instead of "my preference is that...".

No. The reason is because a lot of the people on this thread are also people who take these huge photo albums that are full of just random geometry and devoid of animals or people. As with 99% of humanity, people take negative opinions or criticism against them as a personal attack. That's just the way people are. People need to get defensive rather then face a possible reality that their hobby and personal works are just not good.

> and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed.

They don't have to be followed but they "must" be followed for the album to be "good" in the eyes of the general public. There is a shared reality here that exists outside of peoples individual preferences. Good books exist, good movies exist, but also Bad movies exist and horrible books exist that represent a sort of mass social group consensus on a topic. You either acknowledge that reality or you live in a delusional bubble.

I am saying this. For most of these photography albums taken by software engineers that are devoid of people and only contain inanimate objects, most honest people will think those photo albums are boring and not good in general. You can make make a point that I am wrong about this general consensus. That many people actually find those photo albums to be amazing.

But to call me arrogant and disrespectful? That's wrong. I respect everyone, but that does not preclude me from sharing my opinion however negative it is. I will not lie. "Must" is an appropriate all encompassing word here in expressing a general consensus on the topic I am addressing.

Additionally you should know that I have a lot of upvotes on the parent comment because people agree. I have downvotes on some of the branching threads from people who took it personally. Overall the evidence on this thread supports my thesis in that the general population agrees with me.