The short answer is that you need to decide what you want your photo to say, and that a photo is good if it succeeded in saying it. The long answer follows.
A lot of ink (and some of my own) has been spilt over things like the rule of thirds, framing a scene, lighting a portrait for more flattering features, exposing for shadows, settings and tricks for that “perfect bokeh” - including a disappointed aside in every lens reviewed with fewer than 7 aperture blades. None of these are recipes for good photos. They’re all tools in a toolkit, and having good tools certainly helps you take good photos, but they can’t tell you what “good” means to you.
If you have something to say, you will look for and learn how to use the tools that allow you to say it. In my experience, having started from both ends, it’s far more fulfilling and productive to learn a technique because it lets you capture an emotion or message that you’re excited and passionate to share than to take a photo because you think some flashy new technique will help it (or you) look cool.
There’s a satirical edit of a shopping cart looking far more fly than it has any right to floating around on the internet, and I think it makes this point nicely. It’s funny to put way too much effort into capturing something mundane, and that edit is “good” because the artist had a point to make, it parodies tryhard edits typical in the car scene and subverts your expectations by skillfully using the same techniques on an absurd subject. This message happens to be more memorable than “look at this cool car,” and while some car edits have caught my eye, they often lack the sticking power that something more surprising or subversive might.
So, when taking a photo, I try to avoid the temptation to spam the shutter button. Restraint can encourage careful contemplation about why a photo is worth taking, since “This has GOT to be a pretty picture” is seldom a good enough reason. Look for emotions like “the morning fog in this valley makes me feel calm, like time has stopped moving for a second,” or sometimes for themes like “I feel claustrophobic in this hallway,” or “this building looks like it was patched together over years and years.”
I like shooting film because it encourages this restraint. I have 36 shots on my roll, and when it’s done, tough luck! With that in mind, when I see something I think I might want to take a photo of I have a few steps I go through:
- Do I feel something about this scene?
- Can I pinpoint that emotion, and what about the scene makes me feel it?
- When I put my camera up to my eye, does what I see through the lens make me feel the same?
If any of those steps fail, I don’t take the photo. Without #1, why am I taking this photo at all? Without #2, how will I know which tools I should use to achieve my goal - and what even is it? Without #3, why take a photo when I’ve failed to capture what mattered to me? Even if all these checks succeed, the photo might still not be “good”, but without them it’s guaranteed to fail to convey the meaning I wanted it to.
When I was younger I’d take every photo I could think up on my digital camera, and I’d delete about 90% of them. It was tedious, boring, and it almost killed my love of photography. Part of getting out of that was just getting better at taking photos and part of it was practicing restraint.
There’s a balance to be had here - you need to try new things to learn, and ideally you’ll keep trying things forever. You have to experiment with new techniques, and when everything is new that means you fail a lot, and that’s ok! So if you are new, expect things to fail more than they work out. After years of shooting,nowadays I keep about 2/3 of my photos (the other third are my failed experiments), but when I do take a photo I make sure I know why I’m doing it, and that lets me save on a lot of disappointment and frustration. “I didn’t have anything to say” is a lot more heartbreaking a reason for a photo to suck than “I didn’t get XYZ right, but it could totally work out next time.” Which isn’t to say photos need to be technically competent to be good; I shoot film and that’s sometimes because of its failings rather than despite it. If blur, grain, pale colors, oversaturated colors, or blown highlights capture the feeling I had being there in that moment, they’re to be cherished.
To summarize, take your time, make shots count and know why you’re taking a photo. And lastly, take fewer photos. Live, enjoy your experience, don’t focus so much on documenting it. You can’t feel anything about a moment if you aren’t in it. I usually bring only one roll with me when I want to take photos because it keeps me grounded in the here and now.
Happy shooting!