piano basic requires motor skills which requires a lot of practice to acquire. Basic camera controls like exposure and focusing requires very little motor skill just some understanding which is very easy.
Photography skill isn't much different. Piano certainly has more "motor" skill than photography, but don't sell the brain-skill end of it short. You practice specifically to train your brain to the point that it will be very fast to work out the solution to a problem that used to require more time. The result of all that practice is that the ability to know what exposure settings you should use, how to handle the light, how to compose the subject, etc. all come very quickly to you -- as if "instinctive" (when the truth is it's not at all instinctive -- but you react quickly as though it is.)
There are certain types of photography where you can take all the time in the world to get the shot -- there's no need to be in a hurry. There are other types of photography where you have to be ready in advance. Sports photography, wildlife photography, wedding photography -- all involves situations that need to be anticipated and the camera needs to be set up in anticipation of what sort of shot is going to happen next -- because you can't stop the event from happening. There is no "pause" button.
When you are starting to learn to operate a camera "manually", you learn that the computer inside the camera will offer you advice via the light meter. So you meter the shot, see if the meter tells you that you have too much light... or not enough light... and then you adjust one of your settings to compensate until the computer suggests that you'll have just the right amount of light. This is a "reactive" way of shooting... you get information THEN you react to it. But there is a "proactive" way of shooting... where you anticipate what you're likely to need and pre-set the camera to be ready for that shot before it happens.
When you've been playing music for years, you've memorized certain "recipes" -- you understand cord structures; you've learned to arpeggiate the chords -- and so on. When you see a "new" piece of music, you recognize that the patterns you see in this piece of music, while not necessarily identical, resemble the patterns you've already learned. You pick up learning that new piece of music much faster after you've been playing for 20 years then you could have when you had only been playing for 1 year. While there's certainly motor skill... there's also a lot of brain-skill.
Photography is similar in that there are "patterns" to what you should do depending on the results you need. There's a pattern for "implying motion", another pattern for "freezing action", there are patterns for portraits, there are lighting patterns, etc. These patterns are reused over and over.
When you've been shooting less than one year, you don't necessarily pick up on these patterns -- not intuitively. Once you've been shooting a while, you very quickly recognize these patterns and how to use the camera to capture those shots.
