Wednesday 16 January 2013

Previsualisation

If you don't previsualise your photographs you're just walking around taking pictures of thinks that interest you. That was the gist of a post on a forum a while back which I managed to avoid getting into an argument over. I don't see anything wrong in wandering around looking for interesting things as a strategy for making photographs. Not if your life doesn't depend on making great photos. Where I beg to differ with the theory is probably in the definition of previsualisation.

The term conjures up in my mind a great deal of forward planning. Almost in the way a painter might make preliminary sketches to sort out ideas of composition and colour before starting on a painting. The final outcome being decided on in advance and worked towards. This degree of conceptualising might be advantageous if you have a customer to please, but if you are working for yourself then, for me, once the image has been conceived there's little point in going through the tedium of making it manifest. You might as well give a technician the brief and let them get on with it - rather in the way that Damien Hirst (among others) relinquishes the making of his art objects to his minions.

What appeals to me about photography is that enables you to wander around and find pictures in the world. Pictures you would never dream up in a thousand lifetimes. Pictures that can only be deciphered and understood after they have been made. The trick is to put yourself in the places these pictures are found more often than not.

This is not to say I don't have vague notions of what I want to make photographs of. The subjects, in a broad sense, are clear in advance. It's the specifics I don't previsualise. And any chance discoveries can sidetrack me.

The quarry has been in my mind since the visit the other day. I have ideas of what I want to photograph there buzzing around my head, but no idea how to go about it. I can only decide that by trying different things until they start to work.


When the light changed this afternoon promising blue skies and a colourful sunset I downed tools and grabbed the cameras to try and snatch the last couple of hours of daylight. I had one fairly clear idea of trying panoramic shots among the gnarled trees I'd found. By the time I pulled into the car park the sun had disappeared again and the coastal plain was being covered in mist. It was bloody freezing too!

I was there, so I could at least have a dry run even if the pictures would be either grainy or lacking in definition due to the flat light. Given more time, and more light, there could be something to work with there. The intricacies of the branches and the details of the, mosses, lichens and fungi are lost on these web-sized images. A shame because those are the properties that appeal to me about the environment.


Dragging myself out of the gloom I made another attempt at a view over the quarry to the plain. I liked the result, compositionally, but the file needed too much work to get the colours and contrast to my taste and ended up looking artificial.

I seem to be getting used to the ultrawide angle though. Starting to 'see' (previsualise?!) with it's perspective. So much so that as I was walking away I grabbed a shot more or less on the fly (just the one frame) of something that I found interesting and got a composition I really like. If I'd realised it at the time I'd have made more than a snapshot. Technically it's rubbish. So I fiddled with it, slightly more successfully than with the landscape,  but still proving that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. One of these days I'll get to spend more time at the quarry one a day when the light works in my favour. I can already previsualise the photographs I'll make....






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