We will start with the first of the two personal, internal questions. What are your interests? Only you can answer that question. But it is critically important to do so, for if you are to engage in meaningful photography you must concentrate your serious efforts on those areas of greatest interest to you. Not only that, but you must also concentrate on areas where you have strong personal opinions.

Allow me to explain my meaning by analogy. Did you ever try to say something worthwhile (in ordinary conversation) about any subject you found uninteresting, or about which you had no opinions? It’s impossible! You have nothing to say because you have little interest in it. In general, that doesn’t stop most people from talking. Just as people talk about things of no real interest to them, they also take pictures of things that have no real interest to them, and the results are uniformly boring.

But let’s go farther with this analogy. Take any great orator—say, Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King—and ask them to give an impassioned speech on quilting, for example. They couldn’t do it! They’d have nothing to say. It isn’t their topic, their passion. They need to be on their topic to display their greatest oratorical and persuasive skills. The great photographers know what interests them and what bores them. They also recognize their strengths and their weaknesses. They stick to their interests and their strengths. They may experiment regularly in other areas to enlarge their interest range and improve their weaknesses—and you should, too—but they do not confuse experimentation with incisive expression.

Weston did not photograph transient, split-second events; Newman did not photograph landscapes.