Pre-Visualization

Pre-Visualization

by William Lulow

A week or so ago I was talking about composite images versus images that are not drastically altered, but instead processed to achieve a certain “look” to them. I spoke of Ansel Adams, the famous American landscape photographer, known for his spectacular images of the West. Adams worked mostly with an 8×10 view camera. These behemoths were very large and weighed a lot. They weren’t moved easily. They needed a tripod and a sturdy one at that. Then making an exposure itself was completely laborious. First the camera had to be set up somewhere that would be sufficient for the tripod. Next, the photographer had to have a black focusing cloth over his or her head in order to see the image on the ground glass. The image was always upside down and backwards, so that always took a bit of getting-used-to. Then you had to put the film holder in the back of the camera, pull out the dark slide and make the exposure. Then you had to reinsert the dark slide so that the film could be removed from the camera again. After all this, you had to take the film back to your darkroom, develop it and finally make a print. Sound like enough work for you?

So, the photographers who made images at that time, had to think long and hard about making pictures on the spur of the moment. That usually did not happen. So I cannot imagine Adams roaming the countryside in his International Harvester SUV (long before they were ubiquitous), setting up the camera on the roof platform he built with all the rest of his gear and getting ready to make a few images, if he did not already see the basic image he wanted to make in his mind’s eye.

The art of so doing, is referred to as “pre-visualization,” and usually entails having a pretty good idea about what kind of image you wanted to make before you even took the camera out of its case! The interesting thing about using as slow a camera as an old-fashioned view camera, was that it really slowed down the picture-making process and in so doing, made photographers think a whole lot more about the images they wanted to have in the end.

Today’s digital cameras are, of course, much less bulky to operate and images can be made and even processed in a matter of seconds. But this doesn’t mean that the photographer can’t approach the process in the same way that we used to with view cameras. I call it “slowing down the picture making process.” It means that your aim should be to have a good idea of what you want the finished image to look like even way before you trip the shutter. We all know that this process is most often an approximation, but it always serves a photographer well at least to have an image in mind before actually photographing something or someone. To be sure, one can often “find” special images contained in those that we already have made or are in the process of making, but the ones that are thought out and pre-visualized are usually of superior quality.

Here’s one example:

This is a graphic designer I worked with quite a bit, many years ago. He had decided to go out on his own and wanted a shot to go with an announcement. Almost immediately when he called me, I knew what I wanted the shot to look like. I had been influenced by some of his designs which were rendered in black & white, so I wanted to create a very graphic-looking shot. I began by lighting him from the side which created deep shadows on his other side. I then aimed another light at the background. It was just a light with a single reflector, no umbrella or other diffusing material. A gobo was placed in front of that light so that none of it spilled onto the subject. Because of the nature of the single, directed light from the left, the background was left to be a gradient from light to dark, setting up the white-black-white-black contrast that was very graphic and said exactly what I wanted it to say.

This was an image I just happened to stumble upon in Ogunquit, Maine. I was immediately struck by the lighting and how the railings led the eye into the shot and the highlight on the water during low tide brought the composition around to the left and then back again to the rowboats. This image did not require much post production or retouching, but I knew that it was a strong composition before I even shot it.

So “pre-visualization” is really the art of seeing in your mind’s eye what you want the shot to look like even before you take it. Someone once asked the famous director Alfred Hitchcock, known for his 1940s through 1960s era thriller movies, if he ever watched his own movies. His answer was that he didn’t spend a lot of time doing that because he had already seen them! That’s an interesting take on a visual medium because I always like to look at my own ideas being brought to fruition by the photographic process in general. I have even drawn sketches of what I wanted my images to look like before I ever actually shot them. Another famous film director, Sergei Eisenstein did the same with several of his movies, most notably “The Battleship Potemkin.”  So even though I have gone through the process of pre-visualization, I still love to look at the successful images that come from all the work involved.