how is photography different from many other art form?
Photography is a pretty unique form of art. In particular, the amount of time needed to appreciate a photography is extremely short. Spit second short.
A piece of music is usually a few minutes. A television episodes is usually at least 20 minutes. A feature length movie is at least an hour. In these art forms, audiences can opine on various aspect of a piece. How well does the piece follow the 3-act structure? Was the ending satisfying? Can one segment of the piece tie to another segment? Was that tie-in obvious/intentional? Was there any un-necessary segment?
However, just like a painting, a photo exists only in the 2 dimensional space. In less than a second, an audience would have seen totality of the work. The subject, the color, the background, etc. In that split second, he/she will form an opinion about the work. Often time, he/she didn't even know why he/she liked or disliked the piece.
To take better photographs, we have to be mindful about this. Most photographs can be broken down into just foreground and background. The subject is usually in the foreground. But is the background interesting without overshadowing the subject? Can viewers make out what it was without paying too much attention at the background? Can we use lines to draw the viewers' eyes to the subject? A road that ended with the person? A cloudy sky that's clear around the building? If we are working on a video clip, having a trash can in the frame matter less because it would be clearly not the subject with the camera/subjects moment. However, that trash can will not move in a photo. Viewers would think that it was there on purpose. If they can't see why, the photo will be that much less appealing to them. Furthermore, most of the time, we need to figure this out while we were taking the photos. Of course, computer software can do a lot of these cleaning now, but you will need to spend more time on each photo. That's not realistic when you need to process hundreds or even thousands of photos. I rather spend the time to critique my photos so that I can be a better photographers on the field.