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FallisPhoto — Previsualization
Published: 2017-02-23 17:41:18 +0000 UTC; Views: 961; Favourites: 3; Downloads: 0
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Snapshots are what happens when you are walking along, see something that you think might make a good photo, raise your camera and shoot it. Previsualization is what happens when you are walking along, see something that you think might make a good photo, but you left your camera at home, so you stand there and study it, in preparation for taking a photo of it sometime tomorrow, or next week, or next time a cold front is moving in (so you get clouds), or next time the leaves turn, or next time things are in bloom. You take notes. You decide on what lens filters would be most useful, what focal length lenses you'll want, with what camera body. You get out your smart phone and find out what time sunrise is and which way is east, so you can tell which side will have sun and where the shadows will be. You decide whether the light will make it better to shoot in the morning or in the afternoon. You walk around and find out where the best place to shoot from is likely to be. You think about every option beforehand. In short, the photo is planned and you see it in your head before you ever get near a camera. The photo in your head doesn't much look like what is in front of you and you are planning how to shoot the photo in your head, not the one you see. If you are shooting a fine art photo you plan whether to sepia tone it. Would it look better with a vignette or a reverse vignette? If you'll be shooting film, you plan on which film to use based on its characteristics, not just on what you happen to be carrying that day. You decide on how you are going to develop black and white film and how much grain you want. If you're shooting color, you choose whether the film leans more toward blue (Kodak Gold) or red (Kodak Ektar), or green (most of the Fuji consumer grade films), whether you want enhanced colors (Velvia or Kodak Portra VC), a more accurate color rendition (Kodak Portra NC or Fuji Pro) and so on. Decide on how you are going to frame it. Ansel Adams was a huge proponent of previsualization and all of the preceding is what he meant when he said "good photos are not taken, they are made."
Contrary to the popular expression, the camera ALWAYS lies. Plan your photos, so it does so in your favor and does a good job of it.
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Comments: 9
o-kay...
you ever notice, that while some things happen in great light on a re-occurring basis, others happen once every three months, once a year or once only.
For sure, if you want a great image follow the advice above.
Not carrying a camera, might as well just stand there and enjoy the scene as it unfolds, because it might never come together as nicely again.
But having said that, there's many a time I catch a shadow of what might have been, simply because I've got a camera, was quick enough to get the shot... but the type of camera isn't suited to capture it at sufficient quality to ever be more than a snapshot.
So what we have in this area now is coming autumn - hazy mornings, dew, soon there will be fungi. The grass is green. This happens about once in every four years maybe, in this district, every other year recently has been very dry at this time. I know what light to expect, where and when it's going to hit and what the structure (trees and fences) is. So in theory, I could take the better camera out on a good morning as the sun is rising. What I probably won't do is catch that pheasant, I've never caught him in the frame yet.
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Any scene you can think of has happened millions of times before, but never in quite the same way. It happens, but the odds of anything you are able to capture by sheer chance at any one time being really good are very low. Of course in an astronomical sense, the odds of anything at all happening, ever, are unimaginably low. The odds of being able to capture what you want if you are PREPARED for it, go up dramatically.
Okay, hazy mornings, dew, humidity; to me that spells at least the possibility of fog. Fog has a number of photographic possibilities, especially if you can shoot it from above. I seem to recall that you live in New Zealand, and if I remember my geography, your country is mostly two large islands. One is pretty flat and one is mountainous. Since you raise cattle, it is not too much of a stretch to assume that you live on the island that is relatively flat. New Zealand, at one time, was solely inhabited by a great variety of birds, including the elephant bird and a huge variety of hawk (almost the size of a small plane) that may have inspired the legend of the roc. I remember reading that years ago and thinking "Wow! The roc was real!" The roc was a mythical (perhaps not) bird that was big enough that it could snatch sailors off of ships, fly away with them, and eat them. New Zealand still has a number of bird species found no where else in the world. Why the obsession with a common pheasant? If I want to see pheasants, I need only walk as far as the nearest corn field. If you can't sneak up on a bird in fog, wearing camouflage, then you'd have to be the worst hunter in the world. Hint: try cracked corn.
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oh, the pheasant, we apparently have one.
It's the only one I've seen in the last four years, anywhere (I don't leave the farm much).
He ducks in and out of the gully, usually what happens is I get a glimpse of him as I approach the bridge across the gully -have a camera with no or limited zoom in hand and by the time I'm close enough for him to be more than a speck on the LCD he's registered my presence and shot up into the air and down elsewhere in the gully, I may have caught him on frame in the process of doing that a time or two, never checked.
I mean, he's big, he's low to the ground, there's always the chance that someday... whereas there's no chance of getting the kingfisher, the skylark or the parakeets as high up in the air as they are seen. I do have photos of seagulls, magpies, fantails and swallows and some of the smaller birds, hawks are tricky usually just too far away.
The farm I'm on is in a flat area, but a great deal of the dairy land both in this district and right across NZ is hilly or rolling country, and go a bit north of here you'll get dense fogs for hours on winter mornings but here just a bit of haze, real fog maybe once a decade or so. There's lots of opportunity for great landscapes when travelling but on the farm it's the minutiae (sp?) I find fascinating - the dew-soaked spiderwebs, the fruiting bodies of fungi, the butterflies, the vegetation, and of course, the cattle and how they fit into the landscape. The fact that we rotationally graze means the cattle are in each field once every 3 - 6 weeks - the season has changed, next time they are in that area, and everything else - where the spider webs are, which plants are at what stage, how many dung pats you have to try and keep of the edge of the frame - is dependent on how long it is since it was grazed.
The more I do this the more I understand how things work and so less of a 'snapshot' approach, but the farm has been sold and this will be my last autumn with access to this strip of land.
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Sorry to hear that the farm has been sold. You seem to have enjoyed it.
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well, I've been on the farm long enough (nearly four years now) that on the photography side of things I've got a much better understanding of what to expect, and how to compose the images.
Still tons to learn, but that will have to continue in a new place that might be very different.
This came into my e-mail inbox just now. I think it's another side of what you're talking about in 'previsualising' images but it's taking the approach that if you have a project which immerses the photographer in one subject, or using a specific type of equipment or doing one type of photography, you learn a lot that way... I've sometimes thought of doing this with the mountain we see from the farm.
www.creative-photographer.com/…
Had the opportunity to accompany a relative to some local gardens two days ago and some of what you've been saying about wedding photography started to make sense. I knew the light would be good and the plantings would give unlimited potential for backgrounds, but when I actually got there (they weren't posing, I was trying to get candid shots) it was a case of I'd see the composition coming together, snap a few photos before people moved, continue watching how the group worked in with the background and snap a few more photos later... I got one shot I really like of the people, one of a flower... out of 80 photos.
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About that project I mentioned: I finished my pinhole cameras. I didn't like the cardboard 35mm camera and rebuilt it in wood. The other is a large format 4x5 that I made from a box camera. I'm just waiting for the direct positive paper to arrive. I'll be using that in place of film in the large format camera.
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Funny you should mention projects, because I have just started one. I am going to build two primitive cameras and make a series of photos with them, to show people that you don't need a modern overcomplicated and hyper-expensive digital camera to make beautiful photos. I built the first of them, a pinhole camera, yesterday, using cardboard. I am using two dowel sections as film winders, so it can use 35mm roll film. I am starting on another one in a few days and I am planning to use wood. I think I'll incorporate a bellows into that one and do it in medium format. This will give me a range of focal lengths.
About wedding photography: Think about your photography expedition. Now imagine that you were paid $5000 or more to do that, imagine that you are under immense pressure to get 100 to 200 good photos or so (out of 1000 or 2000), imagine that no one will hold a pose for you or repeat anything, that you have GOT to photograph certain parts of the wedding, as nearly perfectly as possible, and imagine that the light is NOT going to be good. Do you feel that sense of despair and panic setting in yet? Now think about what you did in GOOD lighting, and about how you got one good photo out of 80. You would need to do at least 8 times better to do wedding photography. You need at least one in ten photos to be not just usable but good. Do you feel it now?
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...too scary to imagine.
That was only the third time I'd had the opportunity to photograph other people, and each has been an eye-opener.
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My favorite subject is other people and the most difficult form of people photography, next to wedding photography, is nudes. I do that and nudes, which most guys can't do to save their lives, are easy by comparison. At least with nudes, I have time to think, plan, and set up each shot.
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