A viewers guide to looking at photographs

In the article "A Viewers guide to looking at photographs" the author, James Brooke explains how he feels is the appropriate way to look at a photograph. Brooke starts out by explaining that he does not believe that you can make an educated opinion about a photograph within five minutes. He says that it could take up to weeks to fully understand a photograph. He goes into great detail about how you can't look at the picture as a whole, but that you have to focus on things that make up the picture. Things like color, lighting, line, and clearness. After looking at all of these steps, he thinks that you are more adequately prepared to give an opinion on a photo. I did not particularly enjoy this article, I do agree that you must look at a photo in detail, and you do need to look at all of the things that he talked about, but I also think that it does not take a specialist who spends weeks looking at one photo. Maybe I was misinterpreting the article, but to me it seemed pretentious.