One of the questions most frequently asked is :-
"What makes a good photographer?"
It would be possible to write a whole book on the subject, but after much thought the answer, in it's most concise form, could be distilled down into two parts.
First of all is technical ability. A good photographer can come up with the goods however difficult the conditions are. His (or her) brain thinks in f stops, shutter speeds and fill in flash, to the extent that he (or she) can quickly find the settings required to take a picture of anything. Some people can get the hang of this quite quickly, for others it takes a bit longer, but given enough time and effort, almost anyone can master the technical side of photography.
The second is a bit more difficult. Our eyes and brains work together in a way that a camera doesn't. For want of a better expression, our eyes have a digital zoom facility. As we look anything, our our brain zeros in on lots of different parts of the scene and builds up a complex picture within our head. A camera doesn't function like this. It records a flat image that our brains see as a single picture. I'm sure lots of people have taken a picture of something that looked amazing in real life, then been disappointed with how it comes out in a photo.
With this in mind, in my humble opinion, the essence of what makes a good photographer is the ability to be able to translate what the eyes see into a photograph. Fundamentally we could call this composition, but it's much more than that. It's the ability to look at something, see in your head how it will look as a photograph, and then use the camera to make it a reality.
