VSP Workshops Blog

Seeing Creatively in Photography…….Part 1

The following is the first part of a free tutorial that covers the concepts of ‘Creative Seeing and Visualisation’. For the last four years, this has been our most popular workshop at VSP, and the below notes form part of the content that we cover in the workshop.

What is Creative Seeing?

In its broadest possible sense, seeing creatively can be understood as identifying a potential photograph from what lays in front of you. We sometimes refer to this as ‘visualizing’, and others might refer to it as using a ‘creative eye’. Despite the many names it has, one thing remains constant – it is most likely the challenge of spotting a potentially successful photograph. There is a wonderful cohesion between almost every type of photographic endeavor – every type of photographic course or workshop. Whether you are a fashion photographer trying to work out how to construct the shoot, or you’re just reading a photography book on the train going to work, one thing unites us all: we are all seeking to find and create successful images.
A natural thought in your mind right about now would be – ‘but isn’t the success of an image subjective?’ Yes – but to a point. Photography will always be a personal journey for each of you. You will and should be driven by what inspires you, what moves you and what intrigues you. Some of you will enjoy photographing architecture, others portraits, some of you wildlife. But across each of these disciplines, many successful images share certain traits. If you believe that there is a common ground that all successful images share, then it’s this that we need to understand and go after. On the one hand, as humans we have the ability to make very complex and intellectual connections between our art and our motives. If you’ve ever spent any amount of time talking to an art critic, you’d know what we mean. Our point here is that the basis of photography – before we let any of the complex human motivations and emotions into the equation – is a visual one. However intricate our ideas, however enshrined in motive or emotion our images may be, they start and stop with a visual stimulus. It is exactly this part of the photography – it’s visual qualities, that we’re going to be discussing here.

What is the Goal?

Even the greatest photographers openly state they were never fully satisfied with their work. ‘Photography is the journey, not the destination’, ‘ don’t rest on your laurels’ – there exist any number of sayings that tell us that we should never stop trying to learn and improve.
Each of you will have your own unique goals, different things you like to photograph, different figures of inspiration, different styles and tastes -but whatever we photograph, we all have the same visual devices to work with. Whatever you are shooting, there will be considerations of composition, of visual elements such as shadows, silhouettes, lines, form. By developing an understanding of these visual elements that exist all around us, you will develop your creative palette; your visual ‘toolbox’. Humans are programmed to interpret what they see, and this does not help. A normal person sees a street with a person walking down it and wonders where they are going, and where they bought their jacket from. A photographer must be able to see the light that falls in the street, the long shadow cast behind the person, the lines of perspective that lead our eye into the distance. As a photographer, you must learn to interpret less, and see more.
Remember however, that we’re not talking about learning a set of rules, which when applied will magically produce successful photography. We’re talking about having an awareness of how our photographs’ visual design will impact its success. The idea is not to follow a formula of one part red, two parts shallow depth of field, a splash of texture and there’s you first masterpiece. What we need to do is to understand how the world is made of visual elements – the things the average person has names for ‘boat’, ‘water’ or ‘field’….to a photographer mean movement, reflections, colour, texture, depth. Perhaps a successful photographer needs to think of themselves as a conduit or translator between the human world and the purely visual.

The Obstacle of Convenience

Photographers’ work is judged creatively with the same severity and harshness that a painting might have been 400 years ago. A painter may take a week to draw-in a person – a week of hard work. They think about every movement of the brush – what they include in their painting – how it is composed. So too the photographer’s work is judged this way. When we take an image, the composition, the color, the light, the perspective, the forms, the shapes, are all visual devices we put onto print or pixels. We are not suggesting that photography should be slowed down to the pace of the painter – many styles of shooting make this impossible – street photography, reportage. What we do suggest is to make you aware that the human eye and mind, will respond to the pleasing geometry of a painting or sculpture, just as it may respond to your photographs. The difference is simply that we must deal with the immediacy of the moment – the chaos of the world around us – time constraints – shyness – difficult or unwilling subjects.
A creative eye, as it develops will learn to instinctively know how to compose the shot. You will be aware of the colors and the light even without realizing it.

Case Study

Take for example the image at the top of this page. If you were stood with me at that time I saw this, you wouldn’t see what you see in the image. The human eye does a few things very differently to the lens and camera that mean you need to think how this scene will translate into an image. This thought process is a critical part of ‘visualisation’. Let’s try and trace the steps that I went through from seeing the scene, to creating an image. Looking at this very picturesque courtyard, I could see that the late afternoon sun was creating lovely long shadows of the people walking by. Additionally the iron work of the bridge behind me was casting great patterns on the ground. I waited to see who would walk past. What you don’t see here are the various other people that walked through the scene before this lady – and believe me, none of them were as photogenic as this lady – black coat, blue stick, pink hat – a bit of a gift really! Looking at the scene with the naked eye though, you don’t have the same impact that the eventual image does. The human eye, unlike the camera, has a very wide latitude for picking up detail ranging from the very darkest shadows to the brightest highlights all within one scene. The camera on the other hand does not have this ability – and so I knew that I wanted the scene to be much darker and more contrasty than my eyes were showing me. To give you an idea of how the eye sees this scene, see the following image.

Ok so here we are touching on some of the technical aspect of exposure control – and yes, an understanding of exposure was necessary in order to visualise how I wanted the shot to look. So in exposure-speak, I knew that I wanted the shadows to be almost black so that the lady and her hat popped out of the background, and I knew that I wanted the pink hat to be a vibrant colour, and the pavement to her right to be softly lit. Having worked this out right at the beginning, I took an exposure reading for something middle grey in the direct sun – in this case I may well have used a reading from my skin, or chosen one of the areas of the pavement that was not brightly lit but still had some light – a middle grey. From there, as I often do, I probably would have chosen to slightly underexpose the shot – knowing that it would make the image more bold.
The next thing I thought about was the composition. Having decided to keep the shadows almost black, this would, as you can see from the final image, created a diagonal line of light across the scene. I decided that I would use this strong black area (negative space) to counter the more visually busy lit pavement and shadows. I also realised that I needed my subject to be standing at a point that doesn’t break the patterns of the iron-work shadows, but which also puts their long shadows neatly through the lit area. So, waiting for the subject to hit the spot was the next challenge.
Something I mention many many times on my workshops, with regards to street photography, is the importance of setting your scene, and then waiting and anticipating. You normally can’t control who walks around a corner, or what colours they’re wearing – but you can control what time of day you shoot, where you stand, the background – so I find that choosing my scene first and then waiting for somebody or something to unfold is the most effective way. Although this is not always a relevant approach, as a photographer you do need to take control of your conditions – again, this comes back to understanding how to use and arrange your visual elements. In this shot, the light, the contrast, the colour, the lines and shadows are all visual elements. The scene could have been anywhere in the world perhaps – but if you can learn how to use this visual elements that are all around you – then you can make interesting photographs anywhere. The best kind of environment to really push your photographic skills and learn is one where you have to dig really deep creatively. When you go out into your own neighbourhood that you’ve seen a million and one times, then you’re forced to observe and use what you have around you. This is when your creativity is working overtime. Conversely when you stand in front of the Taj Mahal – you’re being assisted greatly by the objects in front of you. If photography had to be limited to photographing in our back yards or in boring places then quite probably few of us would bother – but what I’m suggesting is that once in a while, when you want a real creative work-out, go somewhere ordinary and try to make something really interesting. Remember it was the photographer Elliot Erwitt that said ‘photography is the art of making the ordinary interesting’….more on that later….

What are Visual Devices?

‘Visual devices’ as they are often called are all around you. Everything you see in front of you has a visual attribute. The attributes we discuss here are those that are widely accepted as being significant to photography.

It would be quite right if at this stage you were asking, ‘but what about the subject matter?’. A photograph is not just about shapes, lines and color. What about the subject, the emotion, the drama? A photograph operates on two levels – the way it looks (its visual qualities), and what it is about (its thematic qualities). Some of us may call this the distinction between content and form. There is no denying the importance of emotion in photography. A photograph without people, or without emotion, can be effective, but its success is arguably limited to its visual appeal. No matter how beautiful a shot you take of a field of sunflowers – its appeal is more or less limited to its visual qualities. This does not make it less successful by any means. What is important is simply to understand why it works, and how it succeeds.

The skills of discerning emotion, and interpreting it, are generally far better developed in all of us, whatever our experience in photography. Anybody can recognize a sad or dramatic moment, but having a skill-set that allows you to recognize visual qualities, is much harder to develop. As mentioned before, we are born to interpret – to look for pavements we might trip over in the street, rather than the quality of light falling across them. Perhaps as photographers, our challenge is to start thinking a little less like a human, and well, think less.

Recognizing emotion does not necessarily mean one is able to aptly convey it. Part of the challenge of a writer is to convey drama with a sense of balance. The skills of a photographer are very similar to that of an orchestra’s conductor. Our subjects, the story, the visuals are all instruments – or actors on our stage. Our job, as the photographer, or the writer, or the painter, is to exercise our creative judgement as to how best to arrange these. Just as in theatre, photographs need balance – somewhere to start, and somewhere to finish. Our camera is a theatrical spotlight that allows us to draw attention to what we want to show and what we feel is important.

In developing your awareness of the visual elements, you will be much better prepared to convey your stories through your lens. By recognizing the importance of visual design in your work, you will give your images the best conditions under which they can communicate. As Henri Cartier-Bresson, once said:

“To take photographs means to recognize — simultaneously and within a fraction of a second — both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis”

To conclude this first part of this free tutorial, we are including a video case study on this topic. The video is presented by myself, Jonathan Maher, and features a landscape scene in Tuscany. It gives you an insight into the kind of thought process that a photographer may be going through when thinking through a scene.

So, that’s it for the first part of this Creative Seeing Tutorial. We’ve looked at an introduction to what ‘creative seeing’ means and what it’s trying to achieve. We’ve also looked at some of the obstacles to grasping the concept, and finally we’ve touched on the very important point of ‘visual devices’. In the next part of the tutorial we will look in more detail at the various visual elements such as colour, shape, line, form etc. These elements form the foundations of what a photograph is, and so they certainly warrant spending some time on. Until then, feel free to leave any questions or comments you have on this first section.

In 2010 we will be running two workshops on Creative Seeing. The first date will be from April 18-24th and held in Venice. The second date, also in Venice will run from 26 Sep to 2 Oct.

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