Chris - A couple of suggestions/thoughts re. submitting your work in User's Critiques...and asking others to spend time looking at your work and offering their opinions. Sometimes, the hardest critique to take sometimes is "this is not a good shot"....I would suggest that these critiques can be infinitely useful though. They can prevent us from wasting time processing a shot, they can force us to look more critically at our shots, cause us to think about what we might do differently next time, and many, many other plusses.
I often time show my wife (who looked at photos all her life with her dad Ted Croner, the New York School photographer - and she is a phenomenally good photo editor) - images I've shot. Hundreds of times when I've come back from a really great shooting experience she'll look at some of my work that I think might be good/great and she'll just simply say "No"..."nothing there"... "sorry" etc...and sometimes...the dreaded "eye roll". While I'm sometimes disappointed, more often than not I'm grateful for a perspective from another outside my intensely personal viewpoint.
These observations from beyond our perspectives can keep us on our toes and out of the "this is what I think I shot", "wow, you wouldn't believe what just happened"...supplying back story and narratives to photos that just aren't that good. In your last posts you again supply all sorts of narrative about the experience, but the shot doesn't tell a story. The old adage is "a picture paints a thousand words"...a problem can occur sometimes when we try and "turn that around"... /B
