Great art is always a balancing act. But all art has both - an emotional content and an intellectual content.
Working outdoors or from life puts you in direct contact with the life force, not just the light and the landscape, but also the vitality of the world around you.
Working from photos makes you a little more analytical, a little more cerebral, because you're less connected to the intensity of life.
If you don't know how to look, you'll end up putting down the wrong things, which only dilutes or cancels the power of your artwork.
Focusing totally on technique, you lose the essence and power of simplicity... The other extreme is just as bad; you see it in a lot of Modern works, where the concept is more important than the technique, resulting in very poor craftsmanship.
