I miss when pictures were meant for special moments / events, not for every single day.
I have taken photographs for years. I love getting the right shot. I love photography. I have tons on pictures of loved ones, and all my pets. Hate to call them pets--they are family members.
That said, I don't post every one online.
Maybe it me, but I don't like people who post every aspect of their life. I understand posting if your genuinely excited about something, or have the need to share something new.
I just cringe when I see a upwardly mobile individual take another picture of the beautiful meal. It was cute at first, but we all know you will have another beautiful plate of food in the future? We all know you have good bone structure. We all know you have tons of friends.
It seems like too many people are using the Internet to publicize, re-engineer how they want world to view them?
In my twisted world, a person's stock goes up if I can't immediately figure them out with a simple google search.
I do understand people who are lonely, or have low self-esteem. I understand the need to overcompensate for the perfection this society expects of us.
Less has become more in a lot of sectors.
The cult of oversharing has devalued everything to the point of bankruptcy.
Twenty years ago I didn't care what you had for dinner. Including a uncomposed phone pic of it doesn't mean I care now. Twenty once daily bad photos of your cat? No.
The photos that I do care about - the well composed image from my semi-pro photographer friend, the photo of the meal celebrating your 20th anniversary or the photo of your animal companion doing something unusual are lost in the sea of mediocrity.
I consistently took more pictures when I used a film SLR than I do now. I've almost completely stopped taking photos, and losing interest in photography.
When we had film, we'd throw away the bad ones, and just keep the highlights. I'd take 36, and end up keeping just one. Now we take so many that we can't filter. But they're nearly all fit for the bin.
Everyone now thinks they're a photographer though. Clearly they're not.
My father was a professional photographer back in the 70's. Not famous by any means, but a number of shots were published in magazines. He's getting up there in age. It feels like photography might be a way that I could connect with him a bit more since we're not super close, and I've been yearning to do something creative and artistic. So I decided to pick it up by purchasing a new DSLR and a few lenses.
After refreshing my memory on ISO, aperture, shutter speed and taking a few hundred exposures I realized...photography is not easy. You can take thousands of photos and apply Instagram filters to them to your heart's content, but they just feel empty.
So now I'm letting the camera collect a bit of dust while I read about theory and composition, and looking at others' photos to find out what makes them appealing (or not appealing).
So take the camera somewhere dull and burn a few dozen shots. For instance go in the kitchen and find some interesting compositions, like a dripping tap. Experiment with unusual angles, framing, depth of field, very long and very short exposures and extreme closeups. Can you get some interesting effect or a sunset reflecting in the chrome at the same time? How can you make it more creative?
Go in the garage and do the same with a drill, a saw, or a car wheel. Portraits are a whole new can of worms, so a sympathetic partner or family pet helps. You'll start to use longer lens than phone, be further back, and take much more flattering portraits.
I'm sure there's some websites out there with better ideas for learning composition than me.
It's a little like the process artists call "learning to see". You'll gain internal awareness of what might make an interesting photo, and see the framing, and notice the light, rather than just taking snapshots.
And sometimes none of this applies, the best photo is being there at that moment with a camera :)
Reading about composition can only help me prepare for spring when interesting things (and people) finally emerge from this frozen wasteland that is upstate New York.
Does sound like you're doing the right things, so good luck with it.
Obviously there is always more to learn (and you should), and clearly i'm NOT advocating that you upload all of your photos to instagram/facebook. But I am suggesting you will learn more by doing then you ever will reading theory.
That being said, I bought Understanding Exposure http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Exposure-3rd-Edition-Pho... based on some HN recommendations (i think), and it covered the basics of everything I needed to know from a technical perspective. I recommend it if you are starting out.
And perhaps I was being a little over dramatic with the "collecting dust" bit. I've used the camera everyday since I've gotten it, if not just to drill the features and how to access them into my head.
And also, part of the reason why I've been reading more than shooting for the past week has been that spring still hasn't come yet up here, and I haven't wanted to stand outside in the below freezing cold during the ~2ish hours of daylight after I get home from work.
However, I do really like the ability to share recordings of experiences with specific people for which there is a shared personal context. So I use sharing tools whose features are biased toward this use case.
I've noticed that a lot of folks I talk to about this don't see the difference between these two use cases.