Recently, I listened to an interview where a landscape photographer was expressing their love for the struggle to make an image: the harder the process, the more rewarding it becomes for them.

This photographer was talking about hiking, but I see this happening in photography in many other ways. Another photographer mentioned using a tripod for every shot solely because of the same reason: to make the process slower and more challenging.

Indeed, we require some degree of hardship to stay engaged in the process and be able to see beauty where others miss to see it. But this is tricky, as it presents a danger: our emotional attachment to the images we make.

Because they were hard to make, because we are so proud of them, because they were a challenge we were able to overcome, we see them through a distorted lens.

They might work along with some context -- think a book with text explaining the conditions the image was made in, or a movie where we show all we had to go through.

But they might not work by themselves. A detached audience might not see in them what we see, because they lack the backstory and the emotions we felt while making it.

This discrepancy between our subjective relationship to our own work, and the response of others to it, is a gap we need to be aware of.

Images can and should convey emotions and feelings, but those must be expressed as much as possible in the image itself. This is true even if our photography has an audience of one, us, because time tends to make everything fade away. If our photographs don't speak to anyone else but us now, they might not speak to us either in the future, once all of those feelings are buried deeper within us.

Related:

• The diminishing returns of hiking
• You must delete the work you are most proud of