Well Merry Xmas everyone, and if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then I hope you are having a nice day all the same!

So… the reason for my posting tonight (Christmas Eve) is to do with Visualisation. The ‘art of seeing’. What comes to some people naturally, is also, something that some people grapple with and fail to grasp in their minds-eye. It’s amazing for me to see how each participant on my workshops ‘see’s’ very differently from each other, even to the point that I sometimes get challenged about how I make my images, because some folks don’t see the compositions work the way I intended them to.

Image © Google

So I often find it very hard to explain visualisation to participants. To me, when I look at scenery, I see compositions all over the place. I’m able to abstract key components of the landscape, distill them down (well, I hope I do), to their simplest form. I don’t say this to blow my own trumpet, but merely to illustrate that as a photographer, we should be able to cut a rectangle out of what is before us, and make an image out of it.

Not all beautiful scenery works well as a photographic image.

So tonight, I came across the little graphic you see above. Yes, it’s from Google, wishing us all a merry xmas.

But I’d like to ask you – did you know it was Google before I told you?

My reason for asking is simple. I believe that if you’re able to see that this is a google logo, before I even mentioned it, or maybe just after I set the context, then that means you’re able to ‘visualise’. Some photography-folks simply don’t see things in a ‘graphic’ sort of way. I do, and I believe that most good landscape photographers are able to see the underlying skeleton in a logo, or a piece of scenery for that matter.

So ‘seeing’ a photograph requires us to abstract. To stop thinking of scenery as ‘scenery’, but as a painting, or a drawing, or a photograph. Being able to disengage our mind from what is really in front of us, and be able to extrapolate a different interpretation – one that will stand up as a 2D photograph, is a skill that most of us possess, but rarely acknowledge.

I leave this with you all for the Christmas season.

Take care, and enjoy the festive season!

ps. I’d like to ask you: what presents did you visualise for your Christmas? For me, that kind if ‘visualisation’ is no different from the way I ‘see’ images before me. It’s all about exercising our imagination, I’m sure.

Some subjects are iconic.

No matter where you are in the landscape, they just appear to be in your line of sight at each and every turn. And if they are not, then they are in the very corner of your eye: asking – or perhaps demanding to be included.

Olstind

I believe that this is a form of visualisation. We are being guided to make an image of something because it has a presence.

It attracts our eye.

For some, this comes very easily, and for others, they just see ‘everything’ and make very un-focussed images: one’s without a presence or point of interest. For those of us who can’t help being drawn to certain subjects in the landscape, I think we are responding to our environment.

It’s almost like we’re on remote control – not really ourselves. We are drawn, or compelled to make an image of something and we’re not conscious as to ‘why’.

Olstind was exactly like that. I found that the mountain seemed to dominate my view at every turn. He demanded to be included in many of my shots and I was very happy that he did, because I found him a most pleasing subject.

I say ‘he’, because the mountain looks like an old man. His face has a beard.

Don’t you think that Olstind looks like he’s got a nice warm coat on, covering his neck too?

So I decided to be obvious about him. Better to just please him and take at least one direct shot of him where it’s clear that he’s the main point of interest, or perhaps better put – the star.

Well, now that I’ve put the finishing touches to my Nocturne eBook about low light photography, It’s time to start focussing more on the visualisation book I have started to piece together.

I’m away next week for a week though. I’m off to the Isle of Eigg to conduct a photo workshop and it’s one of my favourite locations. We have lots of nice home cooking at the Glebe barn to keep us all well fed (honestly, we eat like kings here – it’s great), and we’re only a mile or so away from the beaches we’re going to photograph, so it all works out really nicely in logistical terms too.

So back to this visualisation subject.

Misconceptions

In order to visualise, we need to remove a couple of misconceptions that seem to be quite commonplace.

Misconception 1 – photographs are real

When we look at a scene, we have to be capable of imagining it as a final photograph. This usually means that we have to start to think of a scene as something more abstract. Photographs are 2d representations of what was before the lens. They are statically frozen moments of time.

Misconception 2 – photographs are truthful

How many times do you get people saying that the photographer lied because he manipulated the shot. Well, what about the camera lying. It doesn’t see the way we see. It has a greatly reduced contrast range that it can handle. This is one of the reasons why photographs don’t come out the way we imagined they should. We need to adjust and manipulate the image to match what we saw. But I wouldn’t stop there. Each one of us interprets what we see in front of us differently. Seeing is believing – turns out to be very subjective. So when it comes to making adjustments to an image, we often do this to make the scene conform to what we saw in our minds eye.

Photographs can’t be truthful because they are an edit of the real world. Like a tv documentary that edits the script to match the view point, so to, do we do the same thing with a scene. We choose what to leave out of our story and what to emphasise. We colour the story to suit our own perspective. They are only truthful in conveying what we feel.

And of course, humans do not see in different focal lengths, so how can a wide angle shot of a scene be truthful?

One of the things I think that is important in the making of an image, is visualisation. It’s such a broad word though in terms of meaning. For the past few days I’ve been pouring over all the Ansel Adams books to get a better definition. Ansel says:

‘visualisation is the mental process of seeing the final image in the minds eye before the picture is taken’.

Ansel's Moonrise over Hernandes

In order to be able to imagine, or I prefer ‘realise’ the final image in our minds, I think we need to have an established style, which I think most book writers call ‘voice’. Having a strong sense of what your style is, understanding what you would want to do to a scene in photographic terms comes with experience and practice. I know for instance, that my printing techniques have morphed over time. I seem to have a stock number of applications that I will apply to a scene depending on how I interpret it. For example, one might be to darken the foreground down a little to help navigate the eye into the scene…. Because I’ve had years of experience of interpreting my images in the ‘dark room’, this has rubbed off on me such that I tend to do that interpretation at the point of capture too. It has affected my judgement at the point of making an image. It has, to be blunt, influenced even my choice of subject.

I will choose a subject these days, not specifically because I think it’s beautiful, or obvious (such as an iconic location), but because I find symmetry in it, find balance, pleasing tone and I know it will work well as a photographic print.

This I feel is at the heart of visualisation – being able to look at a scene, reality, and instantly be able to convert it in ones mind from 3D to 2D, with time frozen and understand how the colours and tonal scale of the scene will be rendered on my film.

Which brings me back to dear old film. I find that using film actually helps me in the visualisation process. Because I have no immediate feedback on a preview screen on the back of my camera, I have to build up a mental picture in my head of how the image is going to be interpreted by the camera. The camera as we should all know – does not see the way we see. It is a much less dynamic eye. So there I am out in the field, making an image and for the most part, I have an imagined view of the scene in my head, I have to work out the dynamic range of the scene, use ND graduation to control it. But this all happens as a sixth-sense for want of a better term.

Now consider digital. We get instant feedback, we’re able to see how it turned out and correct if need be. That’s great isn’t it?

To a point.

What digital does for us is break any engagement we have with ‘living in the moment’. The instant we stop thinking about making an image and look at that screen, we may as well be checking our e-mail on our iPhone. We’re no longer aware of what is happening around us, or even where we are. There is also an over-reliance on the screen. A lot of my pupils on workshops ‘believe’ what they see on the display and it can’t be trusted. It’s not calibrated, and screens vary in terms of quality. It is a handicap in some ways to visualisation because it deceives.

But it is a great learning tool in understanding exposure and composition. It’s just that there should be a point when we no long use the screen on the back, because we are capable of visualising the final scene in our minds eye and we can trust our judgement.

Visualisation is the abstraction of reality, in some ways, we disengage from the real world because we are able to imagine the real world as a photograph. So my view is that when capturing a scene on film or digital, we should be striving to get the full tonal scale recorded – no blocked shadows and no burnt out highlights. We’re not trying to capture the scene as is – in one go. We’re aiming to come home with good raw material that can be used to create a good print from.

As Ansel said ‘the negative is the score, the print is the performance’, and as Ruth Bernhard said ‘to stop at the negative, is to not realise the full potential of the image’.

So there we are, visualisation is the mental process of imagining the final print at the point of capture. I think Ansel was right.