One of my favorite literature quotes is the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’ll leave it to you to read the countless high school and college essays that have been written in an attempt to explain or interpret that quote, but I mention it now because I recently realized that a paraphrased version of the quote can apply to photography: All good photographs are alike; each bad photograph is bad in its own way.
I believe that good pictures are all alike because in a sense, they are. They all successfully and effectively capture light. If you don’t use light well, you won’t make good pictures. Of course, even if you have good light, you might not necessarily take a good picture. There are myriad ways
