You are dead-on about knowing the intent of the photographer. I think the best critique you can get is from someone who you are trying to emulate (to a certain degree). Ask them, “What would you have done differently.” Then decide if you like the idea or not.

If half the comments I receive are negative and the other half positive, what am I to believe? It’s so frustrating and a bit discouraging as a new photographer because I just want to produce great photos. I think I need to join a different group.

(If all good pictures were completely unique, there would be no way to make sense of them and no point to the exercise of trying to make them.)

The kicker is that your rules may be completely different from someone else’s, so the only way to discover them is for yourself. The only way I’ve found to do that is to set aside some time a few times per year and look really hard at pictures I’ve made that I like — to try to analyze WHAT I liked about them, in hopes of finding ways to make more like them.

It’s a somewhat grueling process, and sometimes produces completely inexplicable surprises (I wrote about this recently on my blog: http://ranger9.net/?p=240 )

But in my experience, it seems to be the only way to get anywhere — assuming your goal in photography is personal artistic development, as opposed to, say, sales success. (If your goal is sales success, you need to be studying your customers to find out what they consider a salable picture… a somewhat easier task, since your success at guessing it can be measured in dollars.)

Maybe this is the mark of a giant ego, but generally I haven’t found studying other photographers’ work as useful, except maybe for identifying directions I don’t like. Of course there are other photographers whose work I DO like, but analyzing their pictures doesn’t seem to tell me much that I can use for myself — possibly because I can’t compare their intentions to their results, the way I can with my own pictures.

So yes, it’s a very hard job. But on the other hand, we’ve got our whole lives as artists to do it! And what else would we be supposed to do with our time?

PS — I suppose a good mentor might help; I wouldn’t know because I’ve never had one. But doesn’t that simply shift the question from, “What is a good photograph?” to “What is a good mentor?”

Anyway, I still believe it is essential to get a mentor or a role model where you can look up and learn from. Without that, you will feel your work is excellent because you like it. But a lot of time, it is not the case.

It is hard to get a good mentor, if you have one, you’re lucky 🙂