What matters is making images that have your desired impact on your audience. You choose the audience, you decide the effect you want the image to have. How you go about that will vary according to the subject, the audience and your own preferences.
Thus, if you want to please a judge, you need to research what their previous likes and dislikes were. If it's a commercial project - your audience is the purchaser, and the impact should be part of the brief you are working to. For something personal, the audience is yourself, so if it pleases you, then it's a successful image.
I find the most useful resource in developing an aesthetic sense is my own reaction to other images - whether photographic or other media. When I started taking landscape photography more seriously, I spent a long time looking at other images that I liked, and then reducing them to line sketches of the compositional elements to try to understand what worked for me. Then I went back to my own images and looked at my successes and failures in the same way. This approach has helped me improve my compositional eye no end, and has increased my 'hit rate' quite considerably.
|