It's all about context. As I'm pic-taking only for my own enjoyment your example has no relevance. If I were a pro, OTOH, I'd be doing everything I could to satisfy my clients…and that would include trying to anticipate their future wants & needs. But I'm not a pro and have zero interest in emulating that approach.
I'm not precious about my own photos. They remind me of experiences I've had & things I've seen but otherwise aren't that important in-and-of themselves. My favorites end up on a wall for awhile, then get replaced by others, which will in turn be replaced, etc. I get far more pleasure out of continually experimenting than from sticking with any particular photographing style, processing approach…or subject matter.
-Dave-
Well, you'll have to forgive me for not realising this, Dave. You seems to be in a most unusual situation, from my perspective.
Whilst I also consider myself to be an amateur whose main motivation for engaging in photography is the creative pleasure I get from the taking and processing of the shots, as well as the pleasure I get from a sense of reliving past experiences when I view old shots that I've taken, sometimes many years later, I would not go so far as to claim that such enjoyment
excludes other people's opinions and appreciation of my work, as your term
'only for my own enjoyment' implies.Occasionally, I've sold prints in the past for a tidy sum, and occasionally I'll make a large print for a friend or neighbour, charging just the cost of the paper and ink. Sometimes I'll produce smaller prints for friends or relatives without charge, and quite often I'll entertain guests with a slide show of selected images on a large HDTV screen.
As an amateur, I consider myself to be my own client,and just as all clients can differ in their tastes and requirements, I, as my own client, accept that my tastes and requirements may gradually change over time. I frequently revisit old shots with new ideas for processing.
One of the great attractions of the DSLR for me, with its RAW image capability, is the concept that having a RAW file is like having an undeveloped film that can be developed again and again in as many different ways as one likes, without affecting the original undeveloped film. Imagine if Kodak had developed such a process before the digital age.
Experimenting with a noisy jpeg deliberately taken at an unecessarily high ISO, or severely underexposed, in order to compare how much crappier, or how different such an image appears, compared with a clean RAW file of the same scene deliberately processed to appear equally crappy, is fine as an experiment.
However, to exclude also taking a RAW image, or at least a correctly exposed ETTR of the same scene, seems very shortsighted to me, unless your motivation is to take an otherwise meaningless shot of no consequence, apart from its abstract nature of general crappiness.
For example, I would understand perfectly if someone wanted to exploit the banding problem of a Canon 5D by underexposing 10 stops at base ISO in order to produce a tapestry effect of coarsely woven threads.
The subject might be just a plain wall, in which case one might skip taking an ETTR shot, realising that without the extreme banding, the correctly exposed image would be just plain boring and that there would be almost no possibility of one ever wanting to produce a tack-sharp, noise-free image of such a boring subject, for any imaginable reason. Is that your concept here, Dave?
