[snowwrestler]

The biggest contradiction to consider is that the photographer has an emotional context from when they took the photo, that a random viewer does not.

This is at the heart of why so many people overestimate the impact of their photos. They remember being at the Tetons, awake cold and alive at dawn, taking the picture (for example). Or they remember a particular photo session with a model, perhaps someone they knew.

The photographer remembers the moment. But the viewer gets only what is inside the frame of the image.

The crucial thing is that it is totally OK to take pictures for yourself! You don’t need to blow some random person’s mind in order to truly enjoy photography. I think sometimes that gets lost, especially with beginners.

Often people are inspired to take up photography because they loved some images they saw. But delivering that impact to a broad audience is super hard to do. It requires a far more analytical and self-critical approach than most people want to sustain in a hobby.

[munificent]

I'm glad this is the top comment because it's also the deepest insight I've had in my 20+ years of doing photography.

So much of the art and challenge of photography is about creating a single flat rectangular image that somehow conveys the sense of depth, presence, time, and emotional impact that the photographer had while being there in that actual moment in time and space.

A good photo must be super-real in some sense because the act of reducing an entire lived in experience in 4D space-time down to a single flat image discards so much information. It requires just the right subject, framing, composition, light, color, everything so that even after so much is lost, what's left is sufficient for the viewer to fill it back in.

Photography is to experiencing the world as poetry is to prose.

[formerphotoj]

Yes! And if you're trying to please the masses, you risk losing that inspiration if your own vision is not as "mainstream." This may seem minor, but I can tell you from teaching many students that there is a bit of youthful self-identity at work when picking up a camera, and that finding one's vision can be fraught by the desire to receive affirmation for the photos one worked so hard to capture (but that the viewer does not see/feel/appreciate).

[Andys]

That is the art of photography: the challenge of capturing the emotional context in a way that conveys it to a random viewer, drawing on common elements of culture, nostalgia, etc.

[mikewarot]

The only photographs I regret are the ones I didn't take, because I felt weird about taking them at the time, or just assumed they wouldn't come out. I remember the Tetons, and being at the same place that Ansel Adams made a wonderful photo so many decades ago, before the trees along the river grew to full height and completely made it impossible to recreate, but the experience of being there was worth it.

We're at the point now where photographs and storage are effectively free. Take your photos, in RAW if you like, but do yourself the favor of just throwing away the blurry ones, the ones that were obviously bad. You don't need to keep looking at those forever.

I keep mine in folders yyyy / yyyymmdd / camera folder / image_name, and I never edit the originals... I always save them with a new name the first thing I do... I lost my favorite photo of a late friend that way, and now only have the 1/4 scale thumbnail as a result, never again!

One of my favorite photos was taken with a $90 pocket camera (before cell phones) that I borrowed from my bride after my DSLR died.[1] That little Nikon had a "sports mode" in which it would just keep taking photos until you told it to stop... so I laid down in front of "The Bean" in Chicago and made a hemispherical panorama.

The one time I took my own breath away was when I combined 2 panoramas of Chicago, shot from the same point with the same setup, day and night... when I slide the layer transparency in GIMP and stopped.... I actually gasped.[2]

It's fun to take the DSLR out and shoot with it, when health permits. Have fun.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51858792421/in/date...

[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/50858749756/in/date...

[m463]

This is like cooking for yourself vs cooking for others. It is perfectly reasonable to do it for your own health or enjoyment. But you can get a lot of it if you level up and cook for others.

[shagie]

In my own philosophy of photography, I've got a generalized (and admittedly overly simplified model) of:

    For me / For others
    Memories / Emotions

There are photographs that I take that are "memories for me" - things that I want to remember but are otherwise rather meh for other people. There's also photojournalism which is much more on the memories for others quadrant.

Likewise, the are photographs that are emotions for me... and the sellable ones are emotions for others.

All of those are perfectly acceptable photographs. It's a matter of what expectations there are for me when showing them to others. And likewise, there are photographs that other people other people take for memories for themselves that I hope don't disappoint them when they show them to me and its a "its ok" as the response when it was a memory that they want to maintain. Someone else's wedding photograph isn't something that is particularly interesting to me as a photograph.