Hey everyone
I'd really appreciate any advice or perspective on an issue that's been bothering me a lot . In the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal compared to other issues on r/relationships, but nonetheless any opinions are welcome.
My sweet bf of 5 years unfortunately thinks he's good at photography when he's not really. I know photography is a subjective thing - some people think lomo photography looks great, some want their photos VSCO'd to death, some want something a little more true to form. But there are some photos that people see and kinda go 'that's a bad photo', and unfortunately that's how his photos are.
There's a few reasons for this:
- He's very concrete about the 'numbers' and 'equipment' in photography.
- He seems to legitimately think 'bad' photos look good. A few of our friends have recently gotten married and they've all had really innocuous modern style wedding photos but he's been wildly critical of all of them for really concrete reasons. For example a friend's reception photos had cleared been 'warmed up' slightly post production because she was in a venue with fairly harsh office style fluro lights, so the photos were made slightly warmer to make everything look a bit cozier, but my bf was like 'these colours are inaccurate and not true to life'. Or another photo where the photographer had opened the aperture to focus on the couple and the background 'crowd' of guests were blurry, he pointed out that the background crowd wasn't in focus? When I said I think that's the point my bf thought I was insane. Or there was another 'arty' style black and white photo where the wedding couple had their foreheads pressed together, and the photographer had shot it so the couple were a black silhouette against a light archway, my bf was critical of the photographer for not using a fill flash to light up the couple. He doesn't seem to understand artistic choices in photography at all.
He's SUPER SENSITIVE about his photography. He has other hobbies which he's extremely good at, for example building PCs and woodworking. He also engages in these hobbies way more (like every week) than photography, which literally, he's engaged in like once in our relationship together in 5 years. But if you ask him what his hobbies are, he says photography first, and if you mention the other stuff, he says he just 'dabbles' in them. You can also give him opinions and suggestions on the PCs and carpentry and he doesn't get upset at all, but any differing opinions on photography make him very upset. It's like his whole sense of personal worth is tied in with being a photographer and I don't get why.
Because it's become really obvious that we don't agree on photography, we've both taken an 'agree to disagree' stance on this. He initially gave a ton of unsolicited advice every time I took a photo, he's backed off now when we decided we have different opinions on the matter. But the issue is, for all of our shared memory photos, like for our holidays, or when we got our first dog, because he thinks he's very good at taking photos and its very important to him, he takes over the process. We've got all these really fairly ugly photos of our important times together, and it makes me really sad. I feel really embarassed when I look at them. For one of our holidays together he asked why I didn't share any of the photos on social media, and I didn't have the heart to tell him why. I showed a few of my friends privately and they all agreed that the photos were really bad.
On one hand, I don't think it's right for me to say 'your photos are bad' because like I said, it's a subjective thing, and we'd just end up arguing over what counts as a 'bad' photo because we don't agree on this. He also legitimately doesn't seem to see why everyone else sees so it's a losing battle. But on the other hand it's really hard for me to keep pretending he's a good photographer when he's not.
Any advice or thoughts appreciated.
Tldr - bf thinks he's a great photographer, seems to have different photographic artistic tastes to the rest of the world and it's driving me a little nuts.
Submitted September 30, 2020 at 07:39PM by BreadIntelligent9022 https://ift.tt/3kZacXx
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