I too have struggled with this issue, i have many pictures that i have taken of my now ex wife over our 25 year old relationship going to back to college in 1979 ... most of the pictures with poloroid, 110mm, and not long after, 35mm color and black and white, and most of them with a pentax manual 35mm camera without a flash ...
I met her when she was 18 and model she was not and model she never was, but beautiful she was and she knew for the most part the poses i looked for and most of the pics were spontaneous snapshots taken with a lamp or two placed strategically maybe with the lampshade tilted or removed or a hat or see through piece of clothing dulling the light ...
i finally scanned them all, and to me many of the images were extremely awesome ... but since I never cared properly for the negs or the original prints, many of the images had extreme dust, scratches, hair, dirt, fading and other defects ...
as time was available, i have since used what little i knew with programs like paint, paint.net and the photo editing software package that came with my hewlitt packard scanner (i had never used this stuff before) to slowly start to "fix" some of the images that i thought were more awesome than others ... for a first timer, i thought i did pretty well with a few of my favs, many of them i spent several hours even fixing them pixel by pixel using paint ...
i posted some of these pics on a famous website that hosts such pics and while they published some of the rough ones (which i thought in retrospect that were awful and still do), and they rejected the ones that i thought were awesome that i fixed as being "pro" yet all the qualities, the model, the setting, the exposures, were the same ... and i ve been discouraged in posting them ever since ... the message to me was you want to see the raunchy awful ugly ones of my wife, that was good, the good pics (i.e. the lighting the model the exposure, the "fixing") were pro and as a result, were NOT good. Just cause someone gets a lot of it right doesnt make it pro, and it was discouraging ...
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