The following passage is from Roland Barthes Camera Lucida. It is one of the fundamental texts for thinking about photography and its broader philosophical problems. What you'll find is that all this nonsense about lighting really has nothing to do with whether or not you've done something remarkable with your camera. True, commercial photographers have their standards, but these are subjective and answerable to a specific market. The result is usually a mirthless, generic image that lacks the air Barthes talks about. Most of the people who comment on these forums are not artists. They have an inflated idea of what it means to wield gadgets, and they don't commit any time to studying the history of their medium or how to responsibly comment on photographs beyond superficial, technical details. Take, for example, Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs from the 1860s. She purposefully put her subject out of focus to achieve an impressionistic effect. From my subjective point of view, I like how you're trying to get the cool these guys are exuding. You don't anything more than a good eye and an aperture. A good eye can't be bought. This debate has been going on since the Victorians, but it's important to keep things in perspective.
"The air (I use this word, lacking anything better, for the expression of truth) is a kind of intractable supplement of identity, what is given as an act of grace, stripped of any importance: the air expresses the subject, insofar as that subject assigns itself no importance. In this veracious photograph, the being I love, whom I have loved, is not separated from itself: at last it coincides. And, mysteriously, this coincidence is a kind of metamorphosis. All the photographs of my mother which I was looking through were a little like so many masks; at the last, suddenly the mask vanished: there remained a soul, ageless but not timeless, since this air was the person I used to see, consubstantial with her face, each day of her long life.
Perhaps the air is ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life value? Avedon has photographed the leader of the American Labor Party, Phillip Randolph (who has just died, as I write these lines) ; in the photography, I read an air of goodness (no impulse of power: that is certain). Thus the air is the luminous shadow which accompanies the body; and if the photograph fails to show this air, then the body moves without a shadow, and once this shadow is severed, as in the myth of the Woman without a Shadow, there remains no more than a sterile body. It is by this tenuous umbilical cord that the photographer gives life; if he cannot, either by lack of talent or bad luck, supply the transparent soul its bright shadow, the subject dies forever. I have been photographed a thousand times; but if these thousand photographs have each missed my air (and perhaps, after all, I have none?), my effigy will perpetuate (for the limited time the paper lasts) my identity, not my value. Applied to someone we love, this risk is lacerating: I can be frustrated for life of the true image. Since neither Nadar nor Avedon has photographed my mother, the survival of this image has depended on the luck of a picture made by a provincial photographer who, an indifferent mediator, himself long since dead, did not know what he was making permanent was the truththe truth for me" (110).
