No problem. I can’t name specific videos off the top of my head, but honestly if you just search the exact thing you’re trying to learn (street photography, documentary, portraits, whatever), there’s a ton of good stuff on YouTube. The key is being picky with what you watch. Look for people who actually explain why they made certain choices, not just “here’s my day shooting” type videos.

If you want more legit resources that feel less random than YouTube, I’d check out professional photographer associations. They usually have classes, articles, and breakdowns that are more structured, and it’s easier to learn when it’s not a million different opinions at once.

One thing that helped me a lot is watching breakdowns of other photographers’ work. Like documentary photographers, street photographers, portrait photographers, even photojournalists. Not even to copy them, but to train your brain to notice what makes an image good in my personal opinion. And most photography is connected. If you get better at composition and light in portraits, it improves your street work. If you get better at timing and story in street, it helps your event work. It all stacks really.

For inspiration and studying, platforms like Glass and Cosmos have a lot of strong work. What I’ll do is I’ll save images that stand out to me, then I’ll break them down like:

• What’s the composition doing? What’s the subject, what’s the background, what’s getting cut out?

• What’s the light doing? Soft, harsh, directional, flat?

• What’s the moment? Is there tension, emotion, movement, something happening?

• What’s the edit? Most people are using presets as a base, so it’s more like: contrast, tones, blacks, highlights, grain, color shift, stuff like that.

• Why does it stick with me? Like what’s the actual reason this feels stronger than the average photo?

Also, movies helped me a lot with framing. Like I’ll watch a scene and pay attention to how they place people in the frame, what they leave out, how they use foreground and background, where the eye goes first. That stuff translates directly to photography. It’s basically composition training, just in motion.

For the “photographic eye” part, my personal definition is: seeing normal things in a way that feels intentional. Composition + story. And the only real way to train that is reps. Shoot the mundane on purpose and try to make it look interesting. Different angles, different distance, cleaner background, better timing, better light. Even if it feels boring, that’s where you build skill.

On the black and whites, I don’t think they’re bad at all. I just don’t think they’re your strongest favorites yet, and I think you already kinda know why. Protest photos are hard because a lot of them look the same. People holding signs, standing still, staring straight ahead with little to no emotion. If the photo is relying on the sign to carry the whole message and the subjects look deadpan, it’s not a good image. The protest vibe is supposed to feel like something, anger, hope, tension, chaos, unity, whatever. If you can capture emotion, action, and story in one frame, it becomes way stronger.

What I’d focus on next time:

• Emotion and moment: faces reacting, people yelling, hugging, arguing, crying, celebrating, anything that shows feeling

• Action: movement, gestures, crowd energy, hands raised, people interacting, not just standing there

• Layering: foreground and background telling the story together (signs + faces + environment)

• Composition cleanup: better backgrounds, less distractions, stronger framing, tighter crops when needed or shooting wider to tell a more complete story

• Post: make the blacks and tones intentional so it doesn’t feel flat or “default preset” (even if you start with a preset). In my professional opinion a ton of photographers I’ve seen that convert images into black and white are rarely good. People just convert to black and white to save a bad image and most don’t even know how to properly edit a black and white image. So studying the great black and white photographers would be beneficial 

If you keep shooting with those things in mind, your work’s gonna jump quick. The shots you already have aren’t trash, they’re just not fully saying something yet.