Almost every photographer eventually picks up a label. Street photographer. Landscape photographer. Portrait photographer. There's nothing wrong with that. The label isn't the problem. What it quietly turns into, if you're not paying attention, is.

Every photographer has a piece of advice they were given once, believed completely, and eventually had to unlearn the hard way. We rounded up some of the classics. Now we want to hear one from you.

Avoid midday sun. Wait for golden hour. It's one of the first rules every photographer learns, usually before they've even figured out what aperture does. The observation behind it is real. The rule it turned into might be costing you some of the strongest light you'll ever get.

There's a idea floating around photography circles right now, substantive images good, performative images bad, as if the two are opposites and you have to pick a side. We don't buy it. A photograph needs something true underneath it, and it needs the craft to actually deliver that truth to someone looking at it. One without the other doesn't work.

There's a new pizza place in Boston doing authentic Roman style pizza, the only one in the whole city. It's delicious and it's packed, and it got us thinking about why so few pizza places, or photographers, ever actually stand out from the crowd.

Every serious photographer is told to study the masters, Cartier-Bresson, Fan Ho, Weston, Moriyama. But there's a right way to do that and a wrong way, and most people default to the wrong one without realizing it.

What's actually attached to your camera right now? A neck strap, a wrist strap, a hand grip, or nothing at all? This is one of those topics where there's no single right answer, just a lot of photographers who've landed somewhere specific through trial and error. We want to know where you landed.

A graphic designer decides exactly what you read first, second, and third. Nothing is left to chance. Most photographers never think this explicitly, they just feel whether a composition "works." Borrowing the designer's vocabulary directly gives you a sharper tool than instinct alone.

Every photographer worries about noise in their images. Almost nobody worries about the noise in their head, the unfinished argument, the unanswered email, the mental list running underneath everything, quietly deciding whether you're actually present enough to see what's in front of you.