...if a subject is worth doing, it is worth doing to death
Did someone call my name?
...often leave me a little bit cold, and I have been wondering why
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
...
Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.Respect, yes, admiration, yes, envy, certainly, but also a subtle disappointment.
A little while ago
Hi Tide was the LuLa cover photo.
I see warm colours progress to cool, strengthening impression of depth.
I see wide horizontal ripples become narrow, strengthening impression of depth.
I see the bright snags contrasted against the shades of distant trees and reflected in the foreground, leading us across all of the picture surface.
I see the shape of the foreground snag mirrored and reduced a little further away -- a shape reflecting another shape in a photograph full of reflections.
I see the bright snags that lead out of the picture, turn into chevrons that point into the picture.
I see a complex mosaic in the foreground where there might just have been a dull symmetry.
I see that the photo is good,
but I couldn't say 'I like that photo!'.
Maybe it's just that I'm unfamiliar with tide-water areas, so there's no recognition of previous experience to make an emotional connection.
...but being there would have been amazing...
Only if we'd already learned what we must do to uncover what really was extraordinary.
Galen Rowell wrote several columns on that theme -
1998 "Diffraction Fringe" is one example (sorry but you'll have to scroll down-page and click on the article title).
By contrast, the images that delight me and that I try to emulate are almost always the ones that extract beauty and meaning from ordinary scenes.
Scenes which you can more easily imagine seeing? Scenes which are similar to those you have seen? Scenes which you did see?