Visualization and Planning – Dan’s (gdanmitchell) POV
Hi all,
On my previous thread on visualization and planning Dan (gdanmitchell) wrote an excellent post on a somewhat opposing point of view. I did agree with him that, even with very careful planning, photography outings can go south on you and then it’s time to improvise.
This happened to me on the same outing as when I made the B&W images of the rapids. As part of the shoot I had planned to make an image of a suspension bridge that crosses the river. When we got there the setting was nothing like what I had envisioned. The area was very overgrown, limiting vantage points and visibility. At first I was disappointed, but I kept looking around and found a small area on the bank that showed the middle of the bridge. What struck me was how the bridge glowed in relationship to its surroundings, and how rich the greens were. The glow on the bridge was such that I immediately visualized an image with lots of vignetting and dark edges.
I found a composition with the 210mm lens that naturally darkened the edges of the frame with a dark tree on the right and dark forest ground on the opposite side. It was a difficult composition with such a long lens. To get everything in focus I had to use a lot of vertical tilt and had to close down the lens to F32.6. I metered on the bridge on overexposed that reading by one stop
I grinned when I first saw the slide on the light table. It was exactly like I had visualized it at that moment.
So yes, Dan is right. Sometimes we need to improvise on the spot. Still, we need to have a good understanding of what our systems can do, and how we want the images to turn out.
Dan, sometimes photography is, as in the words of Forrest Gump, “like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get” .
.