I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull.
But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.
I travelled a lot circa 2008-10 in and around Asia and recently I've been uploading all those old travel photos to Google Photos simply because every day it randomly pops up pictures from a place I once visited.
Even the bad photos I took back then (I didn't have a great camera) are way better at keeping those memories alive than I would have expected, they may not be the best, but I was there and I took them.
My wife and I started traveling a lot after my younger son graduated and post Covid mid 2021 and we even did the “digital nomad” thing for a year. We still go somewhere to do something around a dozen times a year.
I blog about it. It isn’t for anyone else’s benefit but mine and I doubt I get any traffic to it. It’s more of a public journal. I pay $5 a month for MicroBlog. Our travel season is usually between March and October.
The blog is a much better way to remember trips than just static pictures.
I've had the same experience. My new approach is to do a mental check to see if I could get the same picture from a google search. If not then I get out the camera. That in effect compels me to either enjoy the moment, or to include people in the photo to make it unique.
Pictures of the Grand Canyon. You can see on Google. pictures of the grand canyon with my kid in the foreground... Pictures of a city nearby. You can find on Google pictures of the city nearby from the top of the tallest building in the city nearby. No. Out my back door if I turn left 10° more than I normally do I'll quickly arrive in a spot no human has stood in for decades. Not in a Google search.
I don't want to claim that maybe it's the surroundings that are mundane, because I don't find that true. One of my favorite films is koyanisqatsi, which is, really, just industrial film of earth. As mundane as it gets.
I suppose I cannot fathom this yardstick you describe.
I have another probably simplistic insight.
I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull.
But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.