A blind photographer? It sounds ludicrous - but stop to consider that Beethoven was deaf as a stone when he composed his greatest work, the mighty 9th Symphony. From that perspective, blind photography doesn’t seem that big a stretch.

Yutaka Meijo holds his breath to make sure his camera stays steady, carefully brings the object into focus and waits just a moment before clicking the shutter — relying only on his ears and a hunch.

“I take pictures relying on sound,” said the 18-year-old, who lost his sight when he was seven.

“But there’s just a feeling to it,” Yutaka said, as he took shots of his visually impaired friends playing table tennis, hitting a ping pong ball with a bell inside.

“I press the shutter button and don’t hesitate when I think the moment’s right. The moment can’t be brought back. That’s my secret for taking pictures,” he says.

Yutaka is among 23 youth photographers at a school for the blind in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, whose pictures are gradually drawing public attention.

“I can measure an object’s distance by ear,” blind 12-year-old Yuta Ueno said at a Tokyo exhibition of the children’s works where captions were written in both braille and traditional script.