Jock Elliott
Hall of Famer
- Location
- Troy, NY
In Galen Rowell's Vision, The Art of Adventure Photography, Rowell proposes a four level scale of photography (bear in mind that he shot when film was the only game in town):
"My proposed four-level scale begins with snapped images. Although auto-everything cameras allow images of high technical quality to be made without much forethought, I believe that not even one in a million snapsnots of nature communicate a strong emotional response to their subject as well as a fine preconceived image.
The next level, previsualized, describes passively preconceived images. These are discovered with normal vision and then mentally translated into the language of film. Guided by some understanding of how film sees the world differently than the human eye, previsualization allows photographers to fine-tune and correct a scene that is already before them. This is a far as your camera's instruction manual takes you.
The third level, preconceptualized, applies to actively preconceived images. Here the content, composition, and exposure have been rethought based upon an active visualization of the finished photograph, rather than a passive one that happens to be visible through the viewfinder at the time. The photographer might scout the scene and return when the light is different or seek a different background for the same landscape. This is your basic nature calendar level: dramatic, technically perfect, well composed, but only rarely inspired.
The highest level, created, applies only to images that were imagined as true finished appearance on film before they were seen in real life. They are revealed by a process of discovery that, to me, is by far the most satisfying aspect of nature photography. Even through the failures outnumber the successes, the idea of pursuing a dream image in my imagination and going to find the place where it actually happens before my eyes is what keeps my creative juices flowing year after year."
My reaction: I find that I am almost always in the first category. My mental conception of what I do is that I find images and try to capture them. I don't create images; I see a scene -- a large majority of the time, a dynamic scene, one that could change at any moment -- I react to it emotionally and then I try to capture it. Afterwards, I may do some post processing to try to bring the captured image into line with what I saw in my mind's eye. The idea of previsualizing the perfect image and then going out to try to find it in real life seems utterly foreign to me.
And it leads by logical extension, I think, to the idea of simply creating the perfect idealized image digitally from an assemblage of images. Last year I was cruising some photography books when I came across an image of a tiger walking by an Asian village on a stream with some mountains in the background. It was a staggering, jaw-dropping image, a Holy Bleep, that's amazing! image. The tiger came from one file, the village from another (and it was duplicated and flipped to complete the village scene), the mountains from another image, the sky from another; followed by some 40 hours of photoshop to produce the final result. And somebody had to previsualize and preconceptualize the whole thing before they at last created it.
So which level describes what you do or is it something else altogether?
Cheers, Jock
"My proposed four-level scale begins with snapped images. Although auto-everything cameras allow images of high technical quality to be made without much forethought, I believe that not even one in a million snapsnots of nature communicate a strong emotional response to their subject as well as a fine preconceived image.
The next level, previsualized, describes passively preconceived images. These are discovered with normal vision and then mentally translated into the language of film. Guided by some understanding of how film sees the world differently than the human eye, previsualization allows photographers to fine-tune and correct a scene that is already before them. This is a far as your camera's instruction manual takes you.
The third level, preconceptualized, applies to actively preconceived images. Here the content, composition, and exposure have been rethought based upon an active visualization of the finished photograph, rather than a passive one that happens to be visible through the viewfinder at the time. The photographer might scout the scene and return when the light is different or seek a different background for the same landscape. This is your basic nature calendar level: dramatic, technically perfect, well composed, but only rarely inspired.
The highest level, created, applies only to images that were imagined as true finished appearance on film before they were seen in real life. They are revealed by a process of discovery that, to me, is by far the most satisfying aspect of nature photography. Even through the failures outnumber the successes, the idea of pursuing a dream image in my imagination and going to find the place where it actually happens before my eyes is what keeps my creative juices flowing year after year."
My reaction: I find that I am almost always in the first category. My mental conception of what I do is that I find images and try to capture them. I don't create images; I see a scene -- a large majority of the time, a dynamic scene, one that could change at any moment -- I react to it emotionally and then I try to capture it. Afterwards, I may do some post processing to try to bring the captured image into line with what I saw in my mind's eye. The idea of previsualizing the perfect image and then going out to try to find it in real life seems utterly foreign to me.
And it leads by logical extension, I think, to the idea of simply creating the perfect idealized image digitally from an assemblage of images. Last year I was cruising some photography books when I came across an image of a tiger walking by an Asian village on a stream with some mountains in the background. It was a staggering, jaw-dropping image, a Holy Bleep, that's amazing! image. The tiger came from one file, the village from another (and it was duplicated and flipped to complete the village scene), the mountains from another image, the sky from another; followed by some 40 hours of photoshop to produce the final result. And somebody had to previsualize and preconceptualize the whole thing before they at last created it.
So which level describes what you do or is it something else altogether?
Cheers, Jock