Great thread!
My take is this,
1=yep
2=yep
3+4=yeppers
5=yup on the colors or lack of it, and to me most important....
express what and to what audience?
I have this last one easy with my music. But with photography it is a much bigger challenge in deed, at the moment I intend to think that this shows in context of a variety of work from any given photographer.
The biggest success to me is when some one looks at my work and expresses a feeling that is similiar to what I felt when I decided to take this picture. Then I know, the attempt to communicate worked.
The exiting thing about it is that I learned this can happen with pictures where I would never thought this to be possible in the first place. My own lesson I took home from this is that I know everybody sees things through his own eyes, and while this sounds like stating the obvious, it made a difference to me, because I learned that some of my work is liked a lot, which I personally would consider for the shredder, and work that I spend a lot of effor on and thought to be really some of my best, is dismissed.
Here are four totally different examples of such. None of them I thought to be really good, neither in technical or other ways, in fact i dismissed them all, however, they were perceived by a variety of people from all age groups and different social backgrounds as desirable pictures.
This feedback from people, makes it all so interesting to me, regardless what they say about it, whether they like my work or not like it, their reactions are most welcome either way.