Pigeon and Red Trucks

@danthro: Many thanks. This one has gotten no traction anywhere I've posted it. But what I've noticed looking at many of the blogs on Animus, and at other places, is that my own feelings about what is good are often not in sync with those leaving comments. This is particularly true with regard to my own photos. My personal favorites are often the shots that are least appreciated by everyone else.

I've been somewhat surprised by this because I thought people who were involved with photography would have vastly different tastes than the general population. However, the same kinds of conventional shots that are popular with other audiences --sunsets, flowers, pets, children, attractive women-- are popular here at Animus. They're also popular at other sites, like JPG Magazine, that claim to be unconventional. I'm not complaining, just observing. Part of my motive in posting here and other places is to get a sense of what other people find appealing.

I'm also not immune from finding some of the more conventional shots compelling myself. At JPG Mag people mark favorites, and I sometimes find myself marking an image a favorite that has also had great appeal to others. However, in the more general run of things, I find the images at a site like File Magazine more interesting than the more conventional stuff --though I suppose you can consider File Magazine to just be expressing a different convention.

@danthro: Yeah, the hardest thing about hdr is coughing up the money for the software. As you learn more about something, be it photography, or anything else, and the mystery recedes, you undergo a process of re-evaluation based on this understanding, and what you appreciate tends to change. For instance, if you study something about how movies are made, and you watch a lot of movies (200 plus a year, say), you tend to see movies differently, and to appreciate different movies, than people who see only 20 or so movies a year.

Ultimately, I think where "skill" comes in is how "choice" is affected. You have the required "skill" when you know what to do to capture a scene in the required way to satisfy you're desired ends. I think your photos have substance and purpose when you are satisfied with what you produce --assuming that your results are not limited by the lack of some skill necessary to produce them. In other words, I think you can feel very accomplished when you know what you want to create and how to create it, regardless of what anyone else thinks of what you created. And of course, you are the only one who knows whether or not you're getting the results you want. You can produce very popular images without satisfying yourself; and you can also satisfy yourself without producing images that are popular.

In the end it depends on what you're shooting for. Do you want to create photos at the top of your craft or do you want to make money selling photos? You can master the craft enough to do both. You can learn what sells and take photos for this audience and you can take photos for yourself. Filmmakers do this. Richard Linklater, for instance, is known for making a movie that appeals to a popular audience (like Bad News Bears), and one for himself (like Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly).

BTW, File Magazine always has a number of featured photo series on one theme or another.