The trick to taking good photographs is to take a lot of them. Clap a high capacity motorized film magazine onto your Nikon and shoot a couple of hundred shots at a basketball game, and I guarantee you'll wind up with two or three good enough for the cover of Sports Illustrated. That's why god invented proof sheets (or high capacity memory).

And then there's autofocus, time or aperture controlled exposure control, and multiple lenses.

In wildlife photography, a knowledge of the behavior of your subject is very useful, And a genuine love of nature and the outdoors is certainly a plus. But the real magic happens in the darkroom. They teach you composition, but you quickly learn to crop.

But you're right, some people do have an undefinable flair that's hard to explain.

However, I wasn't talking so much about the esthetics of it. Other than the basics of photography, I'm just an amateur there. I was writing about extracting or displaying information in an image.