Previsualization: Transforming Your Thoughts into Photos

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Oh, they’re just a snapshooter!

That’s kind of the biggest slap in the face that you can give a photographer.

None of us want to believe that we’re snapshooters.

Truthfully, almost none of us are, because we all make decisions as we’re taking a picture—whether we realize it or not.

The picture above may appear to be a simple snapshot—a quick and meaningless moment captured.

However, it was quite the opposite. I conceived the photo and mentally prepared before the camera was even turned on.

There is a photographic term that encompasses this mental process of strategizing and executing an image: pre-visualization.

For a moment, imagine the term “pre-visualization” basically means “translation.”

With pre-visualization, you translate a three-dimensional scene, which you can see in real-life, onto a two-dimensional medium—a photograph. As you can imagine, a significant component of pre-visualization is composition.

The photo above is a perfect example. It was taken in Las Vegas from a 12th-floor hotel room. It depicts a cityscape that is partially obscured by a window shade.

What you see here is what I saw in my mind before clicking the shutter. I didn’t see a window shade or a cityscape; what I saw in my mind was a semi-abstract painting depicted in a photograph.

Key Thought: When attempting pre-visualization, imagine your scene printed huge, framed and hanging on a large blank wall. What do you see?

Pre-visualization began in Hollywood with moviemaking and the art of storyboarding.

Photographer Ansel Adams is credited with bringing the idea to still photography.

Pre-visualization is the art of seeing the finished photograph in your mind before you ever pick up a camera.

It may sound easy, but it requires developed skills in art knowledge, equipment, composition, lighting, exposure and post-processing.

The first step toward pre-visualization is training your eye to see the world in terms of spatial relationships, rather than literal objects.

A spatial relationship, in art, is the ability to perceive the involvement of an object’s position within a given space.

In this example photo above, I saw the pre-visualized the shape of a man in a dark suit surrounded by the space of white buildings.

Idea: When I began taking photography seriously, a mentor of mine taught me this simple trick to help me develop my ability to see spatial relationships. Just cup your fingers and thumb to form a cylinder, then close one eye and hold the cylinder in front of the open eye

Viewing a scene that you wish to photograph through this “lens” removes your peripheral vision and gives you something closer to a two-dimensional perspective. In fact, if you watch documentaries on filmmaking, you will often see the filmmaker using this same technique.

It forces you to see your scene in terms of spatial relationships!

Critical Thought: Practicing spatial-relationship recognition is the first step in developing professional pre-visualization skills.

A spatial relationship is intrinsically tied to light, shadow, color, and shape.

Another fantastic training tool for developing pre-visualization, similar to the technique above, is to view your scene through squinted eyes and using your fingers to “crop” the scene in front of you.

This activity eliminates details and divides the scene into spatial blocks of light, shadow, color and shape.

Idea: As you begin learning pre-visualization and using your eyes and hands as training tools, it’s best to stick with static subjects like landscapes. Once you’ve improved your pre-visualization to the point of no longer needing these techniques, you’re ready to take on moving scenes.

Key Thought: Moving scenes add an additional level of skill to pre-visualization. This extra skill is called anticipation.

This example photo is a perfect scene to begin pre-visualization practice:

Look at this picture using the techniques described above. You will see how it breaks down into a spatial relationship of shape, color, line and tone.

Critical Thought: Understanding your equipment is key to pre-visualization. If you don’t know how your equipment will affect the photograph, how can you pre-visualize it?

In my pre-visualization of the autumn tree photograph above, I saw an almost abstract image with blocks of color and a little to no perception of depth.

Knowing this, I selected a telephoto lens to compress the scene. That equipment further enhanced my preconceived idea for this photograph.

Critical Thought: Pre-visualization begins in the mind, advances to the camera and ends in post-production.

To take the photograph above, I physically saw an orange lawn chair that was sitting in a driveway in the late afternoon light. It was casting a shadow onto the concrete.

In my mind, I pre-visualized the scene as an abstract watercolor painting.

I physically created the picture by framing it as I saw in my mind’s eye, focusing on the shadow more than the chair.

I asked a friend to stand by the chair to cast a shadow in the upper left third of the frame. I felt this would further add a sense of mystery.

However—this is the crucial point in this illustration—this pre-visualized photograph came together in post-production.

Most of what you see in the final photo is nothing close to what was captured in the original digital file. Still, it perfectly completes what I preconceived as a painting on the wall!

In the moments before this photograph was taken, I thought, “Oh my god! She better watch out for those waves!” This thought was the formulation of my pre-visualized picture. But more was needed!

Other core skills for pre-visualization are patience, anticipation and timing.

In the example photo, part of my pre-visualization was to capture the danger and drama of the heavy waves crashing onto the beach.

Without the woman, the pre-visualized shot fails.

This picture was born of a pre-visualized concept. However, it also required patience for the idea to materialize naturally. I needed someone or something to enter the frame and provide a sense of drama and potential danger.

It also required anticipation (having my equipment ready) once the shot began to materialize.

Many people were walking in this area. Several of them got close to where this woman was but then backed away.

When I noticed her, I could see she was going to make a point of venturing out further than anyone else.

I anticipated her action and had my equipment ready.

Finally, I timed the shot for the best spatial relationship. As you can imagine, there was a lot of movement here. The woman did not linger out there on those rocks. I had to anticipate and react when both she and the waves were at their peak spatial relationship.

Key Concept: Think of pre-visualization in this order:

  1. Idea
  2. Spatial relationships
  3. Compose the frame in your mind
  4. Imagine the image large and hanging on the wall
  5. Introduce a story element
  6. Have your equipment ready
  7. Be patient for the story to develop
  8. Anticipate the moment
  9. Capture the shot at peak action
  10. Use post-processing to bring your award-winning photograph to life!

Why Don’t You Give It a Try?

  1. Organize a photoshoot where you will spend the better part of a day out taking pictures.
  2. Do not take a picture before spending at least five minutes thinking about the picture and anticipating what it would look like hanging on your wall. Set a timer.
  3. Post-process to your pre-visualized thoughts.
  4. Print a selection of your best efforts. Tape them to a blank wall in your home. Leave them there for a week.
  5. Each day, position yourself five feet in front of each photo and look at it for at least a minute, if not longer.

What Do You Think?

  • Do your finished photographs reflect your initial pre-visualized intent?
  • Were you able to follow through on your pre-visualization from beginning to end?
  • Do you now have a basic understanding of how pre-visualization can advance your photography?

8 of the Most Important Photoshop Tools for Photographers

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Photoshop is one of the most well known and most commonly used image editing software programs in the world. It’s used worldwide both personally and professionally. When people see a picture they believe too good to be true, the reply is often the same: “That’s Photoshopped.” What many people don’t realize is that many of the images you think are just perfect shots are touched up using Photoshop, whether that be adding a little brightness or totally removing an undesirable person or section. When Photoshop is used correctly and not over done, it can make amazing imagery even better!

While every tool in Photoshop has its use, and, when you know what you’re doing should definitely not be overlooked! One thing you need to remember is that Photoshop isn’t there to “fix” a photograph, a bad photograph is always going to be a bad photograph. Of course the tools you find useful are going to differ to those someone else finds useful, so it’s all a matter of opinion, but if you have a great photograph and it just needs that little touch up, then here are our eight of the most important Photoshop tools for photographers:

1. Hue and Saturation

The Hue and Saturation tool enables you to control the colors in your images based on, well, their hue and saturation. To open the Hue/Saturation tool you can go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation.

Hue refers to the color in your image. Changing this will change the colors in your photograph and so this setting is usually best left untouched.

The tool you’re more likely to use here is saturation; this is the intensity and richness of the colors in the image. When saturating an image you can use the Master box found at the top of the Hue/Saturation toolbox to choose which colors you’d like to saturate. The colors you’re going to want to saturate most are the reds and yellows in your image rather than the blues. Adjusting the saturation allows you to make it look more natural and dramatic while not changing the colors or image too drastically.

2. Cropping

This is one of the more simple tools you’ll find yourself using, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. Cropping is a valuable tool for photographers as it allows them to prep an image for posting online or printing: taking an image and changing its size and/or removing unnecessary empty areas. You can save presets for various sizes and resolutions, enabling you to crop images specifically for various reasons.

3. Layers

Layers are another simple tool that any Photoshop user knows how to use. But while simple, this tool is actually one of the most useful. Layers allow you to work on parts of an image without changing others. There really isn’t much more to say about layers than that, they allow you to layer various edits and section each, remaining its own separate section and having no impact on any other.

4. Levels

The levels tool allows you to correct the tonal range and color balance of an image by adjusting the intensity levels of images shadows, highlights and midtones. When editing the levels of an image you are shown a histogram, which is essentially just a visual guide for adjusting the image tones. You can find the levels tool by going to Image > Adjustments > Levels.

The histogram represents the dark and light tones within the image. If your histogram is mainly pushed to the left hand side it represents darker tones in your image, whereas the right hand side shows brighter tones. This is a tool you’ll likely find hard to use, but with slow adjustments you’ll notice how it can influence your images.

5. Sharpening

Sharpening is a hard tool to use; it requires a lot of practice and a very steady hand with a mouse. Sharpening an image is basically touching up all the lines and increasing their contrast, this will cause smaller features of an image stand out more. Sharpening your image is usually one of the last edits you’ll find yourself doing. The sharpen tool also has an “Auto Sharpen” command which may save you the time. When sharpening an image you should remember there is a fine line between sharpened and over-sharpened; over-sharpening an image will cause it to look unrealistic.

6. Healing Brush

The healing brush is used to replace scratches and small specs you might have noticed in your image. It works like a paintbrush tool but allows you to take a “perfect” part of your image (let’s say you focus on the blue of the sky) and copy that part of your image over the top of the spec or scratch you’ve found within your image. This tool will attempt to blend the section you’re copying with the area you’re covering; this means nothing looks out of place.

7. Exposure

Exposure adjustment corrects the tonal values or lightness of HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. You can find the exposure tool in Images > Adjustments > Exposure. This allows you to edit three settings: Exposure (this adjusts the highlights of your image while ignoring the darker areas of your image), Offset (this darkens the shadows and midtones of your image while ignoring the lighter areas), and Gamma (this adjusts the image’s gamma or midtone values).

8. Vibrance

The vibrance tool saturates the colors in your image, focusing mainly on increasing the intensity of colors in your image. Vibrance works much like saturation except it avoids skin tones (mainly oranges and yellows), so it’s perfect for images that contain people; it saturates their skin tone without making it seem unrealistic but adds to every other color in your image. A simple rule to follow is to use saturation when removing color from an image as it removes color from all colors, and vibrance when adding color. Vibrance essentially acts as a smart saturation, as it will only add color to the dull colors already in the image and not every color while avoiding skin tones.

Shutter Speed Determination for Hand-held Landscape Photos

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Now generally I recommend a tripod for landscape photography, however, I do shoot a fair bit of hand-held landscapes too and trust me, I have had more than my share of blurry photos in my 15 odd years of photography.

Is there anything worse than a Blurry Masterpiece?

In my opinion, there is nothing worse than zooming into the best shot of the day, the miracle shot that captured the moment perfectly, only to discover it’s blurry.

Ok, so how do we shoot hand-held in tough conditions and make sure our photos have a good chance of being sharp?

Shutter speed is critical when shooting without a tripod. We need to shoot fast enough so that any camera shake is not visible in our final photo.

But what shutter speed is fast enough to avoid camera shake?

Interestingly, it varies depending on the focal length of the lens you are shooting with.

Wide-angle lenses are much easier to get sharp hand-held photos than telephoto, as you will see below

The rule of thumb that I use is:

2 times the focal length you are shooting is a good minimum shutter speed as a guide. Of course, the faster – the better chance of a good result.

You may find that with modern stabilized cameras and lenses that you can go even lower, however, I feel that 2x the focal length is a good minimum to start at.

Now you might be thinking, “what on earth is he talking about”.

Hopefully, this clears it up:

  • 20mm lens: 2 x 20 = 1/40th of a second as your minimum shutter speed for a 20mm lens.
  • 50mm lens: 2 x 50 = 1/100th of a second as your minimum shutter speed for a 50mm lens.
  • 100mm lens: 2 x 100 = 1/200th of a second as your minimum shutter speed for a 100mm lens
  • 400mm lens: 2 x 400 = 1/800th of a second as your minimum shutter speed for a 400mm lens.

Of course, the faster the better, if you can.

This won’t guarantee sharp photos every time but it will get you on the right track as far as shutter speed is concerned.

Below are further tips for the perfect hand-held Landscape photo.

• Raise your ISO to achieve at least the minimum shutter speed above.
• Brace yourself against a solid object to reduce camera shake.
• Choose a lens or camera with Image Stabilization.
• Set your camera to multiple shot mode and fire 3-4 consecutive shots. Generally, camera shake is at its highest on the first photo as we press the shutter and will settle down in the 2nd-3rd-4th shots of the sequence.

The Hierarchy of Compositional Elements in Photography

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As photographers, we are storytellers, using the language of visual elements to translate the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional plane. Understanding the art of composition is crucial to capturing compelling images that narrate our unique perspective of the world. It’s like arranging the notes of a melody to create a harmonious song.

However, the concept of an “order” to follow when considering the elements of composition isn’t carved in stone. Each scene, each subject, and each moment brings unique aspects that might prompt us to prioritize one compositional element over another. But for the sake of learning and practicing, it’s helpful to establish a guideline or a hierarchy of these elements. Let’s break down the sequence of considerations you might follow when composing a shot.

1. Vision and Intent

Before delving into the technical aspects of composition, start with the question: “What is my intent with this photograph?” Your vision is the driving force behind your composition. Do you want to highlight a certain emotion, convey a story, or just capture the beauty of the scene? Understanding your purpose will guide your use of compositional elements.

2. Framing and Placement of the Subject

Once you’re clear on your intent, consider the placement of your subject within the frame. The Rule of Thirds is a widely accepted principle to guide this step. The idea is to divide the frame into nine equal parts with two equally spaced horizontal and vertical lines, then place the key elements of your scene along these lines, or at their intersections.

3. Use of Leading Lines

Leading lines are a powerful tool to guide the viewer’s eye towards the subject or a point of interest. These lines can be anything – a pathway, a stream, architectural elements, or even a gaze. The key is to identify these lines in your scene and align your shot to leverage them.

4. Depth and Perspective

Creating a sense of depth adds dimension and realism to your photographs. Play with elements like foreground, middle ground, and background. Use perspective and depth of field to create a three-dimensional effect in a two-dimensional medium.

5. Balance and Symmetry

Ensure that your image feels balanced, which can be achieved both symmetrically and asymmetrically. Symmetry provides a sense of harmony and proportion, while asymmetry, when balanced correctly, can make your image more dynamic and interesting.

6. Patterns and Textures

Patterns and textures can add a rich layer of depth to your photographs. They can either be the subject itself or complement the primary subject. Patterns provide a sense of rhythm, while textures can evoke tactile sensations making the image more immersive.

7. Lighting and Shadows

Lighting is not just an illuminator, but a storyteller. It can dramatically change the mood, texture, and tone of your photograph. The interplay of light and shadow is crucial for highlighting your subject, creating depth, and revealing textures.

8. Color and Contrast

Lastly, consider the color scheme and contrast. Colors can evoke emotional responses and set the mood. Contrast, on the other hand, can draw attention to your subject, guide the viewer’s eye, and add drama to your image.

Remember, while this hierarchy can be a helpful guide, it’s not a set of rigid rules. Composition is as much about intuition and personal style as it is about guidelines. The more you shoot, the more you develop an instinct for composing impactful images. So grab your camera, and let the world be your canvas!

Origin of the Rule of Thirds: Photography’s Golden Rule

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Photography, with its perfect blend of art and science, offers myriad techniques that can be leveraged to capture stunning visuals. One of the most celebrated principles guiding photographers around the world is the ‘Rule of Thirds’. This rule, in its elegant simplicity, has helped produce some of the most powerful and balanced images in the history of the medium. To fully appreciate the impact of the Rule of Thirds, it’s beneficial to trace its roots back to its inception.

The Birth of the Rule

Despite its deep ties with photography, the rule of thirds was not initially a photographic concept. The origins of this rule trace back to John Thomas Smith’s 1797 book “Remarks on Rural Scenery” where Smith coined the term, discussing the balance of light and dark in a painting. This concept was deeply inspired by the theories of the golden ratio, dating back to the ancient Greeks.

The golden ratio or ‘divine proportion’ was widely used in Greek architecture and later by Renaissance artists. This ratio occurs when a line is divided into two parts such that the longer part divided by the smaller part is equal to the whole length divided by the longer part. It creates a visually pleasing balance that is thought to mirror patterns found in nature.

The Intersection with Photography

The evolution of the rule of thirds into photography is a fascinating tale of art adapting to technology. With the advent of cameras in the early 19th century, painters’ techniques were applied to the new medium to establish compositional norms.

In the 1860s, photographic societies began to formulate principles to guide the emerging field. During these discussions, the rule of thirds started gaining recognition among photographers.

The rule suggested that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines. Important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. This technique gave images more tension, energy, and interest than simply centering the subject would.

Influence and Contemporary Use

In modern times, the rule of thirds has become a foundational principle of not only photography but also of visual arts such as design, painting, and even film-making. It’s extensively used in landscape photography, portraiture, and virtually any scenario where an engaging composition is required.

In landscape photography, the horizon line is often placed along one of the horizontal lines to emphasize either the sky or the land. In portraiture, the subject’s eyes are often placed on one of the intersection points to draw the viewer’s attention.

The rule of thirds has also found application in the digital space, guiding website and graphic design. Furthermore, many cameras and smartphones now offer a grid overlay function, making it easy for everyone, professionals and beginners alike, to experiment with this rule.

In Conclusion:

It’s fascinating how the rule of thirds, a principle that started its journey centuries ago in the field of painting, has remained relevant across multiple shifts in artistic mediums. It’s a testament to the enduring nature of the principle and its ability to create aesthetically pleasing and balanced compositions.