Monday 25 June 2018

Before You Press The Button

Before you press the button you should know what the subject should look like. And at the very least or perhaps in companion to before you press.. when you hit the editing desk you really really should know what you want the picture to look like.

I'm not even thinking about old school Ansel Adams visualisation of the subject. I'm talking - look at what you are looking at, what do you see, is it how you think it should look?

This may be at the heart of problem with people using the digital TV screen on the back of the phone/camera. What problem? The device shows what's there right. Well, er yes and well kind of no; and yes but.. Even though the screen shows what and more importantly how the scene will be rendered(ish) in 2D. The photographer - the person using the camera needs to have an understanding of what they are looking at and how the elements work together - on that front, even with digital, nothing has changed.

In that video in the link above Adams talks about that moment when he realised how he could take a picture the way he saw it, not just how it looked, how he could create a picture to tell the story of his vision (visualisation) of how it looked.
This is very important.

That is a landscape picture; but if you look at the contemporary landscape of fashion photography. You can see we are being swamped by pictures of a dress. But no understanding of how a dress looks at its best, no story, no vision. And while people may like the pictures with a, Thumbs Up or little Hearts. It doesn't mean they really love it. People love stories, they love something, with a photographers vision. If your pictures haven't got that, they have very little at all.

Telling Stories in Pictures all over the world..
Kent Johnson, Sydney, Australia.
0433 796 863

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