Two types of photographers

Mossy forest, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I have thought about photography, a topic which seems to continue to interest me.

One way to classify photographers is to divide them into 1) those for whom the visual elements, structures and relations are the key factor, and 2) those to whom the subject matter comes first. This is of course an artificial division, and really good photographers manage both aspects.

For a beginner like me it is often hard to know whether a particular scene can contain a photograph or not. For masters - like Mark Hobson - this seeing part seems to be instictive, effortless, whatever the subject.

One could speculate that if you have that talent then you may not work so hard at the subject level, and thus your photographs might be a bit empty below the surface.

However, I also feel that good photographs work on multiple levels. The visual information in a photograph works on a level beyond words, and thus it is very difficult to predict how a given photo will affect a particular viewer.

For me the visual information in a scene is hard to grasp. I don't have that talent and thus I need to take a lot of photographs to get some reasonably good ones.