You must look at images daily, bombard your mind with photography!

Helps with your own visual memory and visual placement to look at tons of photographs other than yours.  Ask yourself why you do or do not like a particular photo, or how the photo could be improved!  Observe what works, what captivates you, what draws you in, how's the lighting, what's the style, what sort of equipment and set-up was used to make the photo? Did the subject even realize their photo was being taken?  Was there even a subject or was the photo entirely composed of objects or a landscape?  Or all of the above?

What makes a picture work? 

Tireless attention to what makes a picture work is often overlooked and taken for granted.

-Whatever it is about the shot that grabs a viewer's attention and makes him reach for his wallet. The problem is, it may not be the same element for every viewer. I think the only hard and fast rule here is to make the viewer see what you saw in the scene when you shot it...

-(Aesthetics, Technique, Style, Emotion, Composition, Lighting, Depth & Perspective) It would be nice if a picture has to say something, told a story but it doesn't have to. Sometimes it depends on who your audience is to determine if it will sell or not. A picture of an athlete no matter how good might not sell too well in bakery shop.

-Work for who? What kind of picture? Who is communicating through it, and to whom are they communicating? 

Look at contemporary advertising's use of photographs. Some images are purposefully bland, ironically banal, or deliberately awful in technical terms ... because that "works" for the message that particular ad (or its art director, anyway) has in mind.

It's as unanswerable a question as saying, "what makes writing work?" If it serves its intended purpose, it works. But the intended purpose could place the qualitative/content aspects of a given image into nearly any condition. 

Please begin bombarding your mind with images on the daily!!

http://framework.latimes.com/

http://socialdocumentary.net/

http://www.fotovisura.com/home/

http://beautifulplacestovisit.com/

http://life.time.com/#index/74

http://www.primecollective.com/features/

http://www.agencevu.com/stories/index.php

http://www.cbsnews.com/2300-501465_162-10011709.html?tag=page

explore photographers--->

http://kuletski.com/

http://www.bharatsikka.com/index.html

http://www.sasharudensky.com/index.html

http://www.belaborsodi.com/

http://www.ianruhter.com/

http://www.jansochor.com/

visual news postings:

http://www.lostateminor.com/category/photography/

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2012/01/05/captured-welcome-home-the-story-of-scott-ostrom/5172/

exhibitions:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14096169@N07/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/floridamemory/

http://vintagenatgeographic.tumblr.com/