I have been spending a lot of time watching YouTube videos and reading articles providing supposed advice and things you must do to have a good photo. The latest trend I watched was critiquing user submitted photos based on some made up criteria. I don’t particularly care if other people like my photos.
What is the purpose of the photo you are taking?
If you took the photo for no particular reason why does it need to live up to some manufactured standard of excellence? If you took the photo to promote a brand or activity does it do that? If the answer is yes, then great job and great photo. If you took the photo to capture specific colors and time of day and it does that, great job again. It doesn’t matter if it’s in focus, or exposure is what the next person thinks it should have been. If it conveys the point you were tying to show then it’s a good photo. If you spend hours in post creating a “perfect” image and fretting over 1 more level of contrast I feel like you missed the point of photography.
Opinions are common, generally wrong, and someone else’s problem.
I find I usually like unedited photos from just about everyone better than their edited ones. I like the exposure a little off, and other things that show it’s a photo but also adds truth to the image. Perfect is a lie and doesn’t exist in nature so why do we chase it in post? My latest camera I prefer to shoot .7 underexposed. I don’t have a reason other than I like how the image turns out and that’s a good enough reason. Maybe I will look into recalibrating the exposure so my preference is 0 for exposure but why? So when I post on the internet people can’t see it’s underexposed? One of the pictures I liked for many years was overexposed and had crazy sunlight blowing the image out, yet it retained enough detail to show what it was meant to and had a warmth to it that was a happy accident. Don’t rush to judge photos, they may be exactly what you want them to be.
My opinion doesn’t matter either.
In the end what I say doesn’t matter any more or less than anyone else except to myself. Get out and shoot, don’t, buy more gear, don’t buy any, it all doesn’t matter unless it’s what you want. If we all decided tomorrow that all photos have to be overexposed by 3 stops and purple was now green manufacturers would switch in a heart beat and tell us they always felt this way to sell us something new. Influencers would talk about how they knew this was coming and were at the forefront of the movement to retain clout. Anyway there are some photos in the article. If you like them cool, if you don’t that’s also cool. Do your own thing, or don’t.