Visual criterion is not something we learn easily.

For years, photography has often been taught as a giant cookbook disguised as technical education. Put the light here, use this lens, shoot at f/2.8, turn the face forty-five degrees, separate the subject from the background, enable this, disable that. The silent promise always seems to be the same: follow these steps, and you will eventually arrive at the correct result.

And to be fair, recipes work. Of course they do. If they didn’t, workshops would disappear, tutorials would vanish, and half of YouTube would collapse under the weight of cinematic-photo-in-five-minutes thumbnails featuring shocked faces and titles written entirely in capital letters.

The problem is that anyone who has spent enough time in a kitchen already knows an uncomfortable truth: two people can use the same ingredients and still cook completely different things.

Most families know this mystery by heart. Grandma left the recipe behind. Two cups of flour, one spoon of this, a pinch of that, fifteen minutes in the oven. Everyone follows the instructions with near religious devotion, and eventually someone says the inevitable sentence “It’s good… but it doesn’t taste the same.”

Nobody explains it properly. The explanation always drifts into strange territory. It was her hands, the way she stirred, her timing, the fact that she somehow knew when to turn off the stove without checking the clock. Maybe she tasted the sauce first. Maybe there was some invisible ingredient nobody ever wrote down, Seasoning.

Photography feels similar.

Two photographers can stand in exactly the same place using the same camera, the same lens, the same light, and even photographing the same person. They can literally stand shoulder to shoulder and still create entirely different images. Not small differences. Completely different photographs.

And not because one photographer discovered a secret setting buried deep inside a camera menu designed by mysterious Japanese engineers.

The difference often lives somewhere much harder to explain: Visual Criterion.

The problem is that the visual criterion is rarely taught. We learn exposure, composition, shutter speed, aperture, lenses, rules and settings. We learn tools, but very few people stop to explain how someone actually learns to see.

Because seeing is not simply opening your eyes, seeing is choosing.

Research on visual perception suggests that our brains actively organize and interpret scenes rather than simply record them, a topic explored by the American Psychological Association.

Choosing what stays and what disappears, what deserves to remain and what can quietly leave the frame. Choosing what deserves patience and what deserves to be ignored.

That doesn´t mean composition is not important, cause really, composition principles have shaped visual storytelling for generations and remain a foundation of photography education, as explored by Nikon Learn.

Something strange happened to me after years of making photographs. I stopped consciously calculating many of the things I once analyzed. I no longer think through every tiny detail. Sometimes I simply feel that the image isn’t ready yet.

I move two steps, step back one, wait for a cloud, wait for a glance, wait for wind, wait for somebody to lower a hand, wait for chaos to do something unexpected.

Because chaos always does.

That probably explains the plaque sitting on my desk that says Chaos Coordinator.

After enough years with a camera, you realize you are not always searching for an image. Sometimes you are waiting for permission. Permission from light, timing and chaos.

One of the best definitions of photography I ever found did not come from a book. It came from looking at my own images.

Photography often feels like organized chaos. Like a three-ring circus where everything appears random and out of control, yet someone moved the lights, chose the location, watched the trapeze, and somehow knew exactly when to jump. That idea later became part of a larger reflection in The Life After a Photograph, where images become much more than frozen moments.

Eventually, these decisions stop feeling like instructions and become something else. They become intuition. Something like driving after many years or preparing a barbecue without constantly checking the clock. You stop following steps and start recognizing signals.

And eventually you understand something that once sounded absurd: recipes matter, of course, they matter, but nobody remembers the recipe. People remember the seasoning.

Some images survive for reasons that have little to do with technical perfection, something I explored further in Why Some Photos Stay With Us Forever.

That may be why I care less and less about teaching photography as instructions and more about teaching freedom. Freedom to observe, experiment, fail, and slowly develop your own way of seeing.

Because learning the recipe was never the difficult part. The real work is discovering what your vision tastes like. There is something else tutorials rarely mention, and that probably has more to do with learning to see than any camera setting ever will: making mistakes.

Developing visual criterion also means permitting yourself to fail, not only in photography but in life.

Modern culture has developed a strange obsession with getting everything right on the first attempt. We want the perfect photograph, the perfect idea, the perfect sentence, and the perfect decision, preferably without suffering the deeply uncomfortable experience of failing in front of other human beings.

Bad news, life never received that memo.

Most of what we know was learned while improvising. Nobody was born knowing how to drive, love, raise children, cook or understand why a photograph that looked incredible inside our heads somehow ended up looking like police evidence taken at three in the morning.

Most of existence runs on trial and error, which may explain a phrase I have repeated for years:

“I never make mistakes. Well… I made one once. When I thought I was wrong.”

I say it as a joke. More or less.

But humor has a dangerous habit; sometimes it arrives disguised and quietly delivers uncomfortable truths. Because people who never make mistakes often belong to a very specific category, people who never do anything.

Developing your own eye, voice, and visual criterion demands exactly the opposite. You have to try, fail, move the camera, step back, repeat, insist, and accept that some photographs, ideas, and decisions simply won’t become what you imagined.

Grandma’s recipe probably did not appear perfect on day one either. There were experiments, accidents, smoke, and probably a soup somebody politely pretended to enjoy. Technique can be learned.

Visual criterion cooks slowly and tastes better with seasoning.

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