Put your pretensions aside and do a favor by admitting, “I’m a snapshot taker”. Or, “Here are some snapshots of my garden-kitchen-children-best friend-vacation-new shoes-sunset-some guy walking down the street” ... that would be refreshingly honest.
Please, stop calling yourself photographers ... that’s as wrong as saying, because you put a band-aid on a cut, you’re a doctor. You are not photographers. You are not making or taking photographs. You’re mobile copying machines, responders to minutia of the moment, you’re fish attracted to brightly colored lures ... you’re the target audience George Eastman had in mind when he sold the first box cameras ... you are snapshot shooters.
Most of your snapshots are attempts at “beauty shots”. But yours are saccharine, cutesy, boring and devoid of staying power, they're Hallmark Card rejects. Ramping up the image density or saturating (or de-saturating) the color doesn’t mean it’s a photograph. If your goal is being derivative, fine, at least make an effort to copy the real stuff.
Forget Flickr, that's just a dump site of mediocrity. And you don’t have to study the past masters (although it might help). A good start point is to look at the work of contemporary photographers: Henik Knudsen, Erwin Olaf, Florian Ritter, Art Wolfe or Alexey Titarenko.
It wouldn't hurt if you took a few minutes and figured out the relationship of light, ISO, f-stops, depth of field and exposure time. Cameras set on auto hardly need humans for picture taking.
To pound the nail a bit more ... digital cameras are easy and using it as a machine gun is fun but that has little to do with pre-visualization, composition and story telling.
If cats and camels had thumbs they’d be taking the same snapshots as most bloggers.
Did you see the instagrams taken by cats walking over the ipads; now there's real talent!
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