When I was 11 and mentioned to my father one day that i was bored, he came home the next day with an old box Brownie and a film developing and printing kit, told me to shut up and take pictures. Which I did and made countless long rectangular contact prints (kit did not contain an enlarger).
But then I reached puberty, my attention turned to girls, college, jobs. When I was 38 I met a couple of photographers and went with them one day while they photographed rock musicians in the bay area. The next day I bought an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic with a 50/1.4 lens. I learned to develop film, bouight an enlarger, set up a darkroom in a basement, and wandered around San Francisco every day shooting rolls and rolls of film.
I guess I had an epiphany hanging around international photographers during the 1968 San Francisco State College student strike, free-lancing and getting roughed up by the police. A British photographer, shooting for Black Star or Reuters said, referring to a 36 exposure roll he'd just removed from his Leica M2 and handed to a courier, "All you need laddy, is a good one in each roll and yer makin' a living."
Later I would sit with some of these guys in a pub and look at their contact sheets and see the frames they'd circled. And the ones they didn't circle.
I also spent hundreds of hours over the years looking at the photographs of landscape photographers like Ansel Adams and David and Josef Meunch, but it was Danny Lyons, HCB, and W. Eugene Smith that I ended up loving.
Landscapes defeated me. I'll stick to people.
One poster said he learned more from teaching photography than he did from taking photography classes. It wasn't until I read this that I realized that I, too, had the same experience (several years teaching college-level black and white photography). You're wasting a student's time using vague terms when you tell him or her why you think a photograph is good or bad.
I've never taken a photography class. Once, when I was in my mid-twenties, I applied to Brooks in Santa Barbara. They wanted to see my portfolio. I didn't have one. I told them I didn't have a portfolio and that that was the whole point: I wanted to go there so i could learn photography and that then I'd have a portfolio. And my application, of course, was summarily rejected. In retrospect, probably a good thing.