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gdanmitchell wrote:
Lovely images. I especially like how you have pulled visual order out of such a complex and rich scene. (This makes me think of a favorite John Sexton photo near Happy Isles in Yosemite that has an almost unbelievable amount of details contained within its borders, yet still seems to make visual sense.)
And "visualization" (or "pre-visualization") is certainly a very useful skill. But so is "hunting," which is how I often refer to the constant search for images in place where we might not anticipate finding them, so we look. Preparation can be very important and, in some cases, indispensable. However, not all great photographs - not by a long shot! - are the result of such planning, and quite a few - most, I'd say - involve a significant amount of good fortune, intuition, and the ability to act quickly and decisively in the instant.
For me, the thing some call pre-visualization is not quite a single thing. It includes some of the following:
1. What Adams was probably referring to when he used the term, at attempt to imagine the scene not as it is but as it might be in a photograph. (You certainly had to do a bit of that in your photographs with moving water, since that is not literally possible to see "in the wild.") This also goes to understanding how to apply decisions regarding exposure and composition and more in light of what the photo will be rather than what it appears to be, and it also involves decisions about exposure that are focused more on what you will do in post, perhaps, than on trying to achieve an "accurate" capture. Note that all of this applies whether you simply discovered the scene/subject spontaneously or planned ahead of time to photograph it.
2. Literally having an actual photograph in mind, more or less mapped out in advance, and then going out to record its image. I think we all do this sometimes, though I know few great photographers who do it all the time or even most of the time. (I acknowledge that the situation will be different if you are shooting, say, products or certain types of staged fine art work, etc.) By the way, this goes beyond ideas like "I want to photograph that waterfall at noon," to include pre-planning and control over many more elements of the thing.
3. Having a sort of "bank of visual components" in your mind. At one point I thought that perhaps I was odd this way, when I realized that I carry around a sort of mental archive of elements of images - textures, qualities of light, forms, types of motion, juxtapositions, and more - and often, though far from always, when I make a photograph I am, to some extent, finally discovering the real embodiment of these bits and pieces. Eventually, from conversations with many other photographers, I found out that this experience is extremely common, and may be part of what attracts us to certain subjects and certain ways of seeing them and lead to style.
In my view, though I can acknowledge some exceptions, the idea that we really control our images is overstated. There are things we do control, but there is much that is far outside of our control, especially in landscape photography. We cannot make the light - we can look for it, recognize it when it happens, move fast enough to capture it while it is there, and perhaps even increase the odds that we'll be there at the right moment - but in the end it is not up to us.
For me, more often than not, the process is not one of prior knowing followed by going out to capture the known. Instead, it is a constant process of looking, seeing, discovering, experimenting, and growth.
I guess there is more than one way to do this, right? :-)
Dan...Show more →
Thanks so much for your feedback Dan - I really appreciate it.
Yes, there are many ways to go about this photography business. I do enjoy walking around and enjoying the scenery. That said, I'm in my late fifties, and at my age carrying 45-pounds of equipment around in uneven terrain and hot weather is not high on my "enjoyment" list . This last time out the soles on my $#$^@#% expensive hiking boots gave out, and they did as Murphy predicted on the farthest point of my walk. I ended up messing up my left Achilles tendon and have been limping around for a week....
And I agree that for most of us that great light is a very fleeting thing. It can be very hit and miss and difficult to plan for, It can however be parametrized to increase our chances. For example, I have learned that the best color for sunrises and sunsets is produced by high cirrus clouds. I also know that in the fall, winter and spring these clouds show up immediately prior and following cold fronts. That can be planned for. During the summer colors is thunderstorms, and that can be planned for as well, albeit more hit and miss but they do follow a local pattern. In the case of the images above I wanted a heavy dark overcast, no wind, and lots of rain in the prior couple of days. I had to wait for that because those conditions are not very common.
You mentioned Ansel Adams.Yes, He was great and he was out ALL the time. But, I think he was at a terrible disadvantage compared to today's photographers. No weather satellites, no internet, no GPS, and on and on. I use Google Earth extensively for my planning. There are thousands of images made by thousands of photographers readily available for most every location. There is "street view" where you can see where you will be. You can send the coordinates to your car's and handheld GPS. And on and on....
So you see, we can do a lot of planning ahead without leaving home. That said, All of this is worthless if we don't have a vision of what we want the scene to look like in print, and to capture that vision we have to know exactly how our systems work. All of this needs prior planning and visualization. As I get older I realize how precious my time is and I try to maximize it .
Thanks again,
Jose
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