Thanks useful information: 
Does this happen to you? Quite often it does to me.
Yesterday is as good an example as any. I left home early but achieved nothing worthwhile in the first hour, followed by some very pleasing work with landscapes for the next hour or two, and had lunch. Then a long, profitless afternoon session (mostly birding rather than landscaping now) with nothing much to show for it.
That's fine: you don't expect constant success photographing birds, you always get long stretches of nothing decent, but eventually the magic happens. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes it takes days. You just stick with it and don't worry: sooner or later your luck always turns. Today, I was unfussed. I already had those delightful landscapes in the bank, so no matter what else came along or didn't come along, it was a good day. If the afternoon happened to contain a few nice bird pictures, so much the better. But no big deal: any day with at least one good photograph in it is a good day and I reckoned I already had four or five. I wandered slowly home, taking pictures here and there along the way, tired but happy.
So make that a pretty fair normal day. Arrive home: unload the car, make the tea, upload the day's pictures, make a backup. Time to make more tea and admire the results ...
Rubbish.
Complete waste of time.
Not a decent picture in the whole bloody lot of them.
I half-heartedly deleted a few of the very worst duds, too grumpy even to admire the good variety of pictures other members had posted on AP while I was away. The only threads I felt like contributing to were the strictly non-artistic ones on safe topics like lens selection.
A few hours later, I looked at my day's pictures again and felt that there were a few that were not completely horrible. Maybe something could be salvaged from the wreck. (Meanwhile, over on AP, picture posts that had nothing much to do with birds or landscapes seemed more interesting than they had an hour or two before.)
Last thing before bed, I started to think that some of my work for the day could actually be half decent.
When I look at them again later on today or tomorrow, I'll more than likely start feeling that there are three or four genuine goodies and that it was a day well spent.
And by the end of the week, it's entirely possible that I'll have a little portfolio of pictures I am really fond of, ones well worth setting alongside old favourites from previous years.
The thing is, this process - reasonable expectation -> bitter disappointment -> gloom -> faint hope -> slow recovery -> eventual satisfaction - is normal.
At least it is normal for me. Not every time (sometimes I feel OK about my day's pictures right the way through) but it is frequent. I seldom get it with bird photographs - my friend Dr Harsh has looked at so many bird photographs that he can usually tell if they are any good or not at a single glance - but it's pretty normal with my landscapes. (In fact the bird photographs (if I've taken any good ones on a given day) defend against it: no need to get depressed about some lousy landscapes you worked hard on when you have a lovely bird shot or three to pay you back for the day's effort.)
Is this how it works you you too, good AP members?
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Nikon D810: D600 (Astro Modded): D7200 and 'stuff', lots of 'stuff' 
Originally Posted by Tannin
Threadstarter
Cheers all. 
K1, Pentax 18-250mm zoom, Pentax 100mm macro, Sigma 50-500mm, Pentax 28-105mm
(I like work .. but it's not a day out photographing .. like it used to be when I was a courier).
I've ignored that too for a couple of days.
... and she'll fill me in on all the sorted out stuff. 
