i think thinking too much about techniques and

composition and what is supposed to look good because it follows these rules and those rules...

has hurt my ability to see things from a silly "i don't do shit for shit" perspective. like, amateur/super-amateur perspective. a picture can be blurry in all the wrong places and still be beautiful, dammit. well i can like it. it can have a ton of noise and it doesn't have to be the type of noise that we USE on purpose to pretend we're pretending to know all the rules. and it can still look great! something that looks good doesn't look good because it follows rules. i'm not talking about my own pictures. i see other peoples' pictures now and think, "that's underexposed. that's too out of focus." eh what? it's still beautiful. why don't i look at the picture as a picture anymore?

there's something that's wrong with the rule book.