Wait, someone thinks that baking doesn't benefit from algorithms? That you just randomly experiment until you get it right rather than being taught very clearly by more experienced chefs or cooks about ratios of ingredients and temperatures and so on?
What a lot of nonsense.
If someone wants to get into photography, why not read through a basic primer to get some ideas and then head on out to start learning and looking at masters and those whose work you like and admire?
I'm with Slobo - too many people here have either forgotten what it's like to learn (this is hardly the first thread to demonstrate that), or have such immense opinions of their own ability that they presume they were capable of training themselves to the level of master without and basic tips (and that such tips would have somehow sullied their creativity).
That's one point of view.
However, even within the
domestic scene of cooking - let's leave pro cheffing work aside here - there are exceptions to hard rules. Of course, you have to try to differentiate the difference between seeing something done once or twice, reading about it in a book (cooking or otherwise) and having a natural talent for whatever.
I met my future wife when we were both teens in school. Even then, she'd come back to my family home after the movies or something, see what was available and rustle us up a meal for two. I don't remember her ever being taught how to cook anything - and she was only fifteen years old. She went on to make the most amazing meals throughout her life, give successful parties and even in a crisis, never lose her cool (I never will forget when the potatoes she had to hand did not translate well into the gnocchi my uncle had asked if she could make: as soon as she discovered they wouldn't work properly with the flour, she switched to something else entirely and her smile made even my disappointed uncle forgive and forget! The stew that was to go with it was still perfect). So yeah, anecdotal, but still a valid point about nature and what it lets you do.
A downside to this was that every time we went back visiting to the UK, to either parental home, she was instantly handed the apron.
But the point is this: I watched her cook day after day, this and the other, yet today, left to my own devices, I can't cook a goddam thing that's worth the electricity.
Photography isn't that far removed: basically, it is a simple matter of making an exposure, as we all know. Of course folks with agendas will translate it into a huge deal, and it can be until you learn the mechanics of digital cameras and basic Photoshop. But that isn't photography: that's mechanics, as I said, and certainly a thing that can be taught.
Photography is about the grey matter inside your skull, and even a brain surgeon can't put talent into that space if talent ain't there.
David Bailey trained with John French, very well-known in fashion circles at the time. During an interview, Bailey remarked that he had to unlearn everything he'd learned at the French studio. In my own case, I dropped out of photographic night school when the tutor told me, face to face, that he'd abandon photography is he made pix like Bailey. What was I going to learn there? How to be redundant? I already knew more about where I was going than any tutor out there could teach me.
Of course, perhaps the use of the word talent is part of the problem: some without it see it as a word denoting superiority or an attitude of elitism. What it is really, is nothing more than the natural ability you have to perform a particular kind of task. Because one may have it in one sphere does not imply one may have it in any other, so a sense of a broader superiority can be very misplaced indeed.