Staircase and Blind, Central Presbyterian Church, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

I posted this picture to Flickr a couple of days ago. It was taken in our church a week or so earlier after I had been shooting some documentary images for an upcoming slideshow. I like the image (obviously, or I would not have posted it) but it’s not something I would add to my portfolio or print for an exhibition. Several people have, however, commented very enthusiastically and it’s started a bit of a discussion over there including at least one person asking what the fuss is about. This is actually really refreshing since too many comments on Flickr are of the ego-boosting-but-ultimately-unhelpful “great image” type – I wish people would be more critical and honest and comment on images they are not too keen on as well as the ones they love.

I continue to be amazed at how different people see the same image and react so differently to it. For example, my mother-in-law, Rae Dollard, and I attended an exhibition not too long ago and agreed that it was a superb collection of photographs. On comparing notes, however, we discovered that her favourite 3 images were my least favourite and vice versa. Similarly, the Austin Center for Photography had a competition recently to pick images for their homepage. It was judged by a very well-respected photo editor yet I found absolutely none of the 5 winners appealing at all (full disclosure – I entered and didn’t win but, honestly, that has nothing to do with my impression of the result).

This huge difference in taste can be helpful to those of us entering exhibitions or having work critiqued – if you don’t get into the show or if you receive negative feedback you can just put it down to differences in taste and move on, hoping that the next judge’s thinking is more in line with your own and realising that your image isn’t “bad” it’s just not to the judge’s taste. On the other hand, if your image really is “bad” maybe this would tend to prevent you from progressing and get you stuck in your little “I’m a great photographer” fantasy. Now if only there was someone who could tell us which of these categories we fall into?