I think photography is subjective and just as a way of discussing how one person can love an image while another does not, I'd like to show you Don's image from my recent Skye workshop:

This is an image of the Storr on Skye. The Storr is an amazing geological feature and is very distinctive and instantly recognisable here in Scotland. We ventured up here in the afternoon to shoot but the sun was behind the Storr (it always is, unless you shoot in the height of summer). Don suffered a lot of technical issues all week - and had to resort to borrowing my old, scratched Lee ND grads that I lend out to participants from time to time.

The scratches on the ND filters caused a lot of flare in the picture that you can see in the bottom part of the frame. Don wasn't particularly happy with the image for that reason.

I however, completely love this image. I feel it's got a sense of rawness about it. So too often as photographers, we tend to try to make perfect images. Where everything is just in the right place, with the right light and the right depth of field. But I think it's quite refreshing to see this image of the Storr because it triggers something of a magical mood for me.

I think there's a real temptation to think that an image is a failure if it does not live up to what you intended when you shot it. That's why I like to sit on my images for a while because I feel I can be more objective about them, and perhaps see something else in the ones that I would maybe have considered failures.

Anyway, I love this image of Don's because it triggers a surprise in me each time I see it and I feel that the flare adds a certain element of mystique.