[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.