TheFlyingCamera
Membership Council
Welcome to the forum. I think the best piece of advice I could pass along would be to concentrate your work on taking the kinds of pictures that move you; you've already seen that the reactions you get to your landscape work are "meh" but you get a strong reaction to your documentary/journalism work. Keep on shooting that work, as much as you can. If you have to, invent some projects you can pursue (obviously you can't just casually shoot conflict photos, but there are tons of social justice issues in this country - well, anywhere - that you could lend your lens to). If you pursue making work just because you THINK it will sell, because it's popular, you'll end up making work that won't sell and won't resonate because it is inauthentic.
Don't ONLY do street/documentary work - as you progress through your college studies, try to get some portraiture classes and human figure classes too - understanding how to portray an emotion and a character in a formal setting will help you take better pictures in your documentary work, as will learning to see how bodies move and create positive and negative space. Take a class on abstract photography if you can so you can learn to see texture and form and figure out how to apply that - if you do enough of those things, you'll be able to apply them intuitively and subconsciously when shooting other types of photographs, like your documentary work.
Trying to make a living as a photographer is really tough - I think you're very wise to have a parallel career choice so you can do the unexciting thing to pull down a paycheck sufficient to fund your photographic activities (might I suggest software development/data science as a career track with a ton of career opportunity - I do software development by day, and that keeps me in film and camera toys, as well as housed, fed, and reasonably vacationed). I'm not saying don't pursue photography - do as much of it as you can, as often as you can, but don't feel frustrated if you can't make a full-time income from it.
Don't ONLY do street/documentary work - as you progress through your college studies, try to get some portraiture classes and human figure classes too - understanding how to portray an emotion and a character in a formal setting will help you take better pictures in your documentary work, as will learning to see how bodies move and create positive and negative space. Take a class on abstract photography if you can so you can learn to see texture and form and figure out how to apply that - if you do enough of those things, you'll be able to apply them intuitively and subconsciously when shooting other types of photographs, like your documentary work.
Trying to make a living as a photographer is really tough - I think you're very wise to have a parallel career choice so you can do the unexciting thing to pull down a paycheck sufficient to fund your photographic activities (might I suggest software development/data science as a career track with a ton of career opportunity - I do software development by day, and that keeps me in film and camera toys, as well as housed, fed, and reasonably vacationed). I'm not saying don't pursue photography - do as much of it as you can, as often as you can, but don't feel frustrated if you can't make a full-time income from it.