Wednesday, August 17, 2022

 SEE WITH YOUR IMAGINATION


In my Right Brain Photography book, classes, and workshops, I stress the concept of "See with your imagination." If you can do that, you can see something before you see it.

This can be a difficult concept to grasp for some photographers, but here is a non-photography analogy that might help. Some people, and businesses, buy what, to us, are mundane, non-descript houses of negligible value. The reason they do that is because they see, using their imagination, what we don't see. They see the potential. They see how those houses might look if they "do this" or "do that" to them. 

I use that same visualization process when I look at scenes or subjects that have potential. They may not look like much, but I see the potential--if I "do this" or "do that" to them. If you are with me during those moments, you would ask, "What are you looking at? You're really thinking of photographing that? Why?" 

Below are "before" and "after" images that help explain what I mean. Maybe this will connect the dots for you.

This first image is of a scene that looked exactly as my eyes saw it. Pretty bland, huh? I look with my eyes; I see with my imagination. 



The more I looked at this scene the more my right brain, my imagination, took over. I could see how this scene might look if I came back at twilight, just after sunset, and "painted" those dead branches with my flashlight. I use a large off-road emergency LED flashlight for these occasions. I knew I was going to paint each of the three bush-like elements with the dead branches, then paint the alkaline sugar-like areas as well. 

I was with one of my former photography students and good friend that day. I told him what I had in mind and suggested we go out for dinner and come back later around sunset. We did.

It was dark by the time we got back. He wanted to take the same shot, so we both set up our tripods, almost side by side. With my instructions, we set our cameras on the BULB setting (research this on Youtube), set them for manual focus, f/stop at f/13, and composed our shots. I used my flashlight to light up the scene so we could both focus roughly one-third up from the bottom of our viewfinders--that's my go-to focusing point for scenes like this one. 

Once we had our composition, the right focus, and depth-of-field determined, we locked our shutters open and I started painting. I painted for about one minute and fifteen seconds. By the way, this is more art than science. I know that, except for rare occasions, I will need to bracket my shots. The length of each exposure will vary, depending on the scene, the subject, and the lighting. It's called bracketing.     I later decide which one is the best one to work with and fine-tune.
What I captured in-camera is what I envisioned in my imagination. Voila! 



One day I drove along a road in north central Arkansas before sunset. I happened to spot a really cool area to my right just as the sun was peeking along the horizon. I quickly stopped and walked to the top of a hill.

The valley below me was covered in a soothing, peaceful rolling fog. I knew I had to work fast. I took a couple of quick shots but wasn't satisfied with them. Then, within seconds, it occurred to me to change my White Balance to fluorescent to see if I could pick up what I was feeling, not what I was seeing. The moment felt serene; peaceful. This image gave me what I felt


The image below gave me what I saw, before I switched the White Balance
Big difference, right? 



Below is yet another example of what my eyes saw. 


You're probably thinking, "Okay." When you come across a scene like this, I urge you to stop, look, and see the potential. Don't just skim over the scene. To do so results in walking away, convincing yourself that there's nothing there to waste your time on. 

As I mentioned earlier, seeing with your imagination can be hard to grasp for some. 
So, you ask, what did I see? I kept scanning the middle of the pool, seeing some reflections of nice early spring budding colors. I also saw the water in the pool gyrating. It reminded me of an impressionistic painting. 

The more I stayed on that mental path, the more clearly I saw what I was going to extract from the larger scene. Once I honed it on it, it occurred to me to do something I am known to do-- create an image, knowing that I will show it; display it "upside down," or right-side up, depending on how you see things. So, I got the shot and later turned it 180 degrees in order to give me my impressionistic image--the image I had seen with my imagination. I used a fast shutter speed (1/250) in order to freeze the water gyrations in the pool. 



Why would anyone want to photograph an outside wall of a Taco Bell? Well, if you see with your imagination, you can look beyond what a Taco Bell building is and see the art it creates.

Such was the case one morning as I drove by a Taco Bell. I saw something from the corner of my eye that caught my eye. I turned around and drove closer to the 'Bell's structure and saw something I liked. I didn't see a Taco Bell. I saw color, shapes, and shadows. But the shadows were too short that early in the morning. So, I decided to keep shooting around town and go back in about an hour and revisit the art Taco Bell had given me that morning. I'm glad I did.

                                     


I'll leave you with one more example. Stay with me on this one. Below is what I saw one day as I was shooting in the Butterfly Pavilion in Colorado. What do you see?



Now, this is an extreme example of seeing with your imagination. I drew on my college art days and training for this one. Part of seeing with my imagination is that I don't see subjects. I see light, color, shapes, forms, lines, etc. In this case, I saw the color red on those ladybug decorations on the right. On the lower left, I saw those little pinkish flowers. You can barely see them in this photo. I could barely see them in real life.

This is where my imagination took me. Light pink would look good against a red backdrop. The flowers are pink. That one ladybug has a lot of red. What do I have to do to bring those two thoughts of color together? If you draw an imaginary straight line between the tiny flowers and the ladybugs, it gives you a good idea as to where my camera would need to be in order to see those two colors together.

So, that's what I did. I walked around those plants on the left and positioned myself about three feet from the ground and, getting close to the flowers, aimed my camera at the flowers, making sure I could see red in the background. I used a shallow depth of field to blur the red backdrop and get a "soft" feel--f/7.1, to be exact. Click.



I hope I have encouraged you to go out and force the use of your right brain hemisphere and imagine. Think outside the box that's outside the box. Think crazy. Think outside the confines and limitations of your programmed thinking. 

"The mind....birthplace of limitations," from the book What A Great Idea, by "Chic" Thompson. 

If you need additional help with this, feel free to e-mail me. We can schedule a ZOOM lesson.