Pre-visualisation
Learning from the master who saw into the future

Ever wondered why photography is a rage as a hobby? Why amateurs – from housewives to middle-aged balding businessmen – are willing to shell out RO500 for the latest digital SLR, all the while blissfully unaware of what those three letters stand for? It's the same reason you were never quite sure of what to expect till you got your film rolls developed and your prints collected. It's the reason why you held your breath, crossed your toes and waited for the moment of truth at the photo lab, for deep blue skies or washed out scenes.

The truth is that you've never been quite sure of what to expect on your own, and have been at the receiving end, and mercy, of the forces at large, the photographic process. The latest SLRs make smart decisions for you, and they’re more like complex computers that take photos than light-tight boxes. They are a shorcut solution to the most basic of photographic problems, and this is the reason why you will buy, and love, the latest auto-everything camera. But you’re still just a spectator to the latger picture. You don’t quite know how your photo will look, even as you press the shutter. If you knew exactly how your shot was going to turn out, would you really even need to see a print? Or lose sleep somewhere between a Canon 400D or a Nikon D80?

Such aniticipatory thrills might be the charm for weekend shooters, but this has been the bane of professional photographers. Imagine returning from a Venezuelan tepui only to find your film turned to mush in a photo lab in Al Khuwayr – you're too late, and too far, to ever make it right again. This problem is, to a large part, solved by seeing your results immediately on your camera’s LCD screen – another shortcut that lets you get away from not knowing your craft well enough.

But whether you're surprised by great colours or tragedy, the bottom line is that you're surprised – which means you're not a good enough photographer. The key to better photography is to visualise how your photo will look before you even shoot it. This is when photography can be elevated above hobbyists and even professionals and can be considered an art form. We're talking of the ability to look at a scene and know the ways in which it can be reproduced – and then going ahead and shooting it in a way that will give you that thought-of result. Can you imagining looking at a scene out of the window right now and knowing exactly what shades of luminescence each part will attain? Where the highlights will blow out, the shadows will disappear into black and the greys will have the deepest of detail? Ansel Adams came up with the Zone System, and behind its deliciously technical name it was nothing but a form of what he termed 'pre-visualisation.'

To put it in his own words, "Visualisation is a conscious process of projecting the final photographic image in the mind before taking the first steps in actually photographing the subject. Not only do we relate to the subject itself, but we become aware of its potential as an expressive image. I am convinced that the best photographers of all aesthetic persuasions see their final photograph in some way before it is completed, whether by conscious visualisation or through some comparable intuitive experience."

Why do scenes look different when reproduced in photographs? This is because the human eye can see many more tones and colours than can be reproduced either digitally or in print. Thus, photographs are to some degree interpretations of the original subject values. Much of the creativity of photography lies in the infinite range of choices open to the photographer between attempting a nearly literal representation of the subject and freely interpreting it in highly subjective departures from reality.

People usually say that a photographs never lies. That couldn't be further away from the truth – and yet if you look closely, photography is not about black and white truths and untruths. It is a vague, grey mix of science, art, personal interpretation and multiple realities. It can be everything and nothing. So is photography then about manipulation? It gets even more complicated, because you might have to manipulate the process to arrive at something that looks more real, rather than let the camera, digital sensor, film and paper run their course. You have to tamper with truth to achieve it. Take Ansel Adams: " My work is frequently regarded as 'realistic,' while in fact the value relationships within most of my photographs are far from a literal transcription of actuality. I employ numerous photographic controls to create an image that represents the equivalent of what I saw and felt. If I succeed, the viewer accepts the image as its own fact, and responds emotionally and aesthetically to it. It is safe to assume that no two individuals see the world about them in the same way."

While photography is often viewed as an art, it really is a restricting medium that shows its man-made flaws by its inability to reproduce reality, and its inherent need to be manipulated. Take a traditional black and white print from Ansel Adam's time: its maximum range of brightnesses (or reflection densities) is about 1:100. This means that the deep blacks of the print on glossy paper reflect 1/100th as much light as the lightest areas. How different is that from reality? A lot – original scenes can cover a range as high as 1:10,000 – so you have the limited capability of reproducing only a painfully small fraction of that.

Have you followed this stream of thought – of limitations, alterations and reproductions – so far? Photography is a complex and fluid medium, and its many parts aren't applied in simple sequence. Rather, it is a process like the art of a juggler in keeping many balls in the air at one time. Each element of photography must be clearly and separately understood – ultimately at the intuitive level – before it is possible for them to merge into a single and coherent function.

Since visualisation and pre-visualisation are deliciously vague concepts to follow, Adams dumbed it down into a set of values anyone could apply to any scene, for any photograph. This he called the Zone System, which we have written about earlier. Refer to our August 2006 issue to see how you could follow it.

The Zone System
To match the tonal range of his media – negatives and printing paper – Ansel assigned each level of luminosity in a scene to a 'zone.'

So now every time you compose your shot you have to decide which set of zones you want to choose in a scene. Remember that each zone exists only in relation to the other, and the entire set is linked together. So while you need to identify ten different tones (actually 11 when you count Zone 0), you have to set only one, like Zone V, the middle grey. Once you set it (or any other individual zone), each other zone will fall into place in relation to it.