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.
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.