I vividly recall avidly reading Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, savoring every idea, every concept, every technique they discussed. I guess I’m a zone system kind of guy at heart.
One thing they both said that baffled me were their comments on previsualization. Seeing the final image in one’s mind’s eye before snapping the shutter was beyond my ability. Boy, was that ever intimidating.
Well, umpteen years and thousands of photographs later I still feel challenged by the notion of previsualization. But I think I may be getting a glimmer of a hint.
One previsualization ah-ha can when I realized that you can’t previsualize if you aren’t master of your darkroom. It doesn’t matter if it’s one of those darkrooms with the nostalgic odors or your computer monitor (hopefully backed up by multiple GHz CPUs and terabytes of disk storage). If you don’t know what can be done with an image, how are you ever going to previsualize what you want to get from it?
More importantly, if you haven’t experienced what you can do with an image, you won’t be able to previsualize. In other words, if you’ve never taken a less-than-outstanding image and turned it into something outstanding, you will never be able to see the potential in the scene before you.
So, it would seem that the first step toward the ability to previsualize is to experience all the magical things you can do in your darkroom and be aware of them when you’re shooting. Then, at least when you’re preparing to trip the shutter you can say to yourself, “I think I’ll do thus and such with this image.”
Live Oak near Mustard Road, Southern California
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