manjamanga

I fully agree. I don't get it either.

Sure, this guy, for example. Now it's so obvious. But the first time I looked at the photos in my phone, he totally fooled me.

I feel like they take some well framed and pretty, but also irrelevant images

They feel irrelevant to you. They may feel the same about some of your photos, while you may consider them to be your best work. What makes someone enjoy a photograph will vary wildly from person to person.

What makes a good photo indeed? I look at Henri Cartier-Bresson photos and some of them just don't do anything for me.
And sometimes, I see a shot with 10 likes from some anonymous guy on Flickr and consider it an absolute masterpiece.

And then there are photos that no one would look at twice, weren't it for the context they're inserted in. Some photos stand alone. Some photos owe their meaning and value to a bigger context.

There is no objective criteria to decide what a good photo is, especially from an artistic standpoint. I think this is a very important fact to internalize for any artist, photographer or otherwise.

My most used lenses don't have autofocus. Yes, autofocus is great but it's also a tradeoff.
If you like to use fast lenses, autofocus adds a lot of size, weight and cost.

What you describe is more of a theme than a style or genre.

I suspect there are more men than women practicing it, but that doesn't mean it's harder to succeed as a woman, just that fewer women tend to do it.

A good percentage of my favorite photographers are women, some of them going all the way back to the 1960s.

So you shouldn't really care about the demographics, just go for it. It's a very competetive field, it's hard for everyone.

You learn the tools you really use. Everything else you just learn about.

Portraits, either studio or environmental. There's something special about photographing people that I don't really get from other types of photography.

I also enjoy photographing animals a lot, both pets and wildlife.

Living things, I guess.

I'm not sure what we're supposed to talk about. The several thoughts in this post seem disconnected and contradictory.

There is no such thing as "full frame equivalent aperture". The only thing that changes when using a lens in a smaller than full frame sensor is crop. It's the same light, its the same aperture, just cropped.

People talk about "aperture equivalence" because to get the same perspective on a cropped sensor, you'll need a wider focal length, and longer focal lenghts will have a shallower depth of field when compared to wider focal lenghts at the same distance. It's convoluted and dumb.

For any given focal length, the aperture is the same on all cameras, the same light goes in, the depth of field at a given distance is the same. A 50 f1.8 is always a 50 f1.8.

And none of that has any bearing on ISO or the sensor's performance.

Because its not one of the three or four brands normal people know about. Most people don't care about brands of watches that cost way more money than they would ever consider to spend on a wrist accessory.