If you want to be accepted as a photographer, you have to speak the lingo.

We tend to talk about photographs along one scale: good or bad.

In practice, photographs are usually taken for very different reasons, and they make sense only within those intentions and limitations. Judging them by a single standard often misses the point.

A great LinkedIn headshot wouldn’t work at all on Tinder. That doesn’t make it a bad photograph - it just means it was made to do something else.

So rather than asking whether a photograph is good or bad, it can be more useful to ask what kind of photo it is, and what it’s trying to do.

We don’t see the world as it is - we see a useful version of it. Cameras are less forgiving. If you want to take better photos, you have to learn to notice the shapes, distractions and distortions you’ve been unconsciously ignoring.