Creating An Image

Note: For some reason this article failed to print, so I am reposting it here.

Creating An Image

 by William Lulow

Sometimes you just see a photograph and kind of know what it will be. You know that it’s good, but you didn’t begin with a pre-conceived idea. It was just something you saw that had a photogenic quality to it. This happens quite a bit in the creative process. You get an idea or in the case of pictures, you see something. Musicians feel this all the time.   Maybe they will be thinking of something and a musical line will well up in their head and they will feel an urge to play it. Sometimes a lyric will come to mind and someone will jot it down and then try to put a melody to it. Or, sometimes you think of something to say or a feeling you get and you then need to find a way to translate it to a visual.

So, here is an image that I saw happen right before my eyes as I was shooting something else:

It was a boat on the water with the reflections of sunlight in the foreground. I was actually intrigued more with the patterns of light than anything else and I actually started shooting just the water. Then I saw the boat there and thought it would add a nice element. That’s how this image developed. It wasn’t pre-conceived at all. 
Then there was this image, which was definitely a thought before I produced it:

I knew I wanted a shot of the bridge and I also knew that I needed some foreground in the shot as well. So, then it became an issue of finding the right spot to set up the camera. Once that was done, the next challenge was to add enough light to the rocks to make the foreground visible. That was accomplished by using my on-camera flash with a diffusion card to spread the light a bit. I then had an image that came close to what I saw in real life. 
Here is another image that I “saw” in my mind after I experienced it in real life. With the clouds, I knew it had to be a vertical black & white photograph. It was accomplished with the use of two filters, a gradient and a #25A red filter:

That is how the creative process works. See something, then use your knowledge and tools to make it all viewable.