Photos for information

I have been working everyday on my second painting. Some interesting and different things have happened. The first being, after I decided the foreground was not working, in my mind I kept thinking about this one view I frequently saw in Siena, which I had taken a picture of. I ended up printing out the photo and using it to make compositional changes. This was surprisingly liberating for me to do, because sometime in graduate school I developed a belief that it is bad to work from photographs. When I think about why I may have begn to believe this I recognize that I heard some faculty say that they couldn't work well from photos, so I interpreted it as a bad thing to do. After making the changes I am more satisfied with the rhythm the shapes of the rooftops make, but I stil feel it is too tight. Probably because the image is too literal yet. I think I will start a new one soon to get an objective distance from it.