>>3913945>and keep taking photos, even if they're bad.no, the point is to NOT take photos if you know they're going to be bad.
If you bring the viewfinder up to your eye and say, "ehhh i don't think it's that great", then don't press the shutter button.
Since you're new, you can take it as a learning experience and ask yourself: "why is it not that great?". Maybe it's the lighting. Maybe it's the messy background. Maybe it's the unsettled figure-ground relationship. Maybe it's just a boring trash can that you relaly don't need to take a photo of.
But if you can go through this exercise each time before pressing the shutter, you'll eventually be able to start doing it as you walk around your environment. And that's when you'll save a lot of time and compositions will start naturally popping up.
Some people make the mistake of asking themselves: "how can i make it better", and then try goofy poses or awkward perspectives trying to "force" a composition. Then they post their pictures on /p/ and ask how they can "salvage" the photo in post processing.
If the subject isn't interesting to you, then don't force yourself to take the photo. If it doesn't look good to you viscerally, your mind is telling you that it's not an aesthetic picture. So why clutter your hard drive with ugly pictures that you'll end up deleting when you get to the post processing phase?
Learning to self-curate before taking a photo is the most important skill a photographer can learn
