An Objective View, Subjectively Speaking

Even though this post does not contain photos, I think it contains an important message for those of us that create photos, therefore all the text.
On more than one occasion I have shown people - disinterested parties that had nothing to do with my work at that time - various photos that I had shot on a given theme, before revealing the one I thought was the best. And more than once I had people pull out a shot that I was intent on eliminating, and said how much more they liked that one. Not just one person, but usually a handful - enough to make me reconsider keeping the image.
At first I began to think that perhaps I was not really as creative as I had thought, since all of these people gave a blank expression toward my 'crowning image', and insisted that I keep one that did not speak to me at all. Wow, didn't they see the vision I was going for? Didn't they "get" what I was doing in the shot I spent hours perfecting and tweaking? Was my idea really so tepid that they didn't immediately connect with it and run off into fields of daisies singing songs about it?
Then it dawned on me: Maybe my idea of what is the 'greatest shot ever' was just that - my idea. I might think it is awesome, but others connected more readily with something else. I had to step back, in a very cold and objective way, and realize that I was just one little person with one more idea, in a sea of people with ideas. No better, no worse. Photography is about creating images that speak to people, not just me. I might not know how or why a particular shot speaks to them (maybe they don't either), but that is the amazing thing about the arts, and creative work: Sometimes it is the thing that you would never imagine that speaks the loudest to people. Interesting.......

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C. M. Franke | Photography

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