![]() What does it look like? What’s the most prominent feature? Is it soft and delicate? Hard and moody? An abstract? Imagine a finished image on your wall.Was it a rock, a feeling about the place (moody, serene, beautiful, scary)? First think about what attracted you to the scene and caused you to set up your camera. ![]() Here are some steps to follow to help you with photographic visualization before you shoot: The next time you’re out photographing, try taking a moment to disconnect from the reality of the scene in front of your lens, and try to visualize a photograph before you shoot. These are all things I consider, usually even before I set the camera up. We can plan for these interpretive and expressive things before releasing the shutter! We can skew color relationships and local contrasts to strengthen our statement. We can visualize making a sky or other element lighter or darker than the meter says it ought to be. Photographic visualization also includes what we have come to call post-processing. Will a longer or shorter exposure enhance motion in a scene? Is it stronger vertically or horizontally? Are there any distracting elements around the edges of your image? But in all cases, visualization dictates the equipment and techniques required to achieve the vision. It might mean choosing a particular vantage point to emphasize the qualities of a foreground object. It could be as simple as ‘seeing’ a final color image in delicate pastels rather than in bold, vibrant colors and contrasts. Photo visualization does not, however, require that you see a finished print that is markedly different from the real qualities of the actual scene. He visualized how he wanted the print to look and used his understanding of technique to realize that vision. ![]() In Ansel’s case, his knowledge of technique - knowing what a strong red filter ought to do - enabled him to imagine, or visualize, a final print with a much darker sky than the yellow filter would have afforded. One of Ansel’s favorite sayings was, “There’s nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” At the same time, a concept can be sorely limited in clarity by a fuzzy knowledge of technique. It’s also possessing the technical know-how to create the image that’s in your mind, even if it differs dramatically from the reality of the scene in front of you. It is the ability to picture the essence of the final print in your mind before releasing the shutter. Simply put, photographic visualization is the confluence of imagination and technique. So…just what IS photographic visualization and how do you visualize a photograph before you shoot? To my way of thinking, it is the single most important element in creating an expressive image. He discovered photographic visualization.Īnsel ultimately came to refer to this freedom from recording only what the camera and lens could capture in a technical sense as visualization, and he wrote about it extensively during his lifetime.īy itself, photographic visualization doesn’t assure a successful final image, but it does set the stage for the ensuing choreography of photographic steps. For the first time, he was conscious of the difference between what his camera lens saw (the literal) and what he saw in his mind’s eye (the expressive) as the final print. The image that resulted from this experiment proved to be a turning point for Ansel in his photographic explorations. That is called photographic visualization. With one glass plate left unexposed, he daringly made another exposure, this time using a red filter that he hoped would result in an image that was more in tune with what he imagined, or visualized, the final image should be, instead of what was actually in front of him. There, he made a dramatic image of the monolith using a mild yellow filter to darken the sky a bit-a generally recommended and accepted practice in those days.īut what Ansel felt about the scene before him was more dramatic than what he knew the yellow filter would give him. In April 1927, during one of his regular trips to Yosemite, a 25-year-old Ansel Adams trekked up to the ‘diving board’ on the west shoulder of Half Dome.
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