I used to be a "seat-of-the-pants" photographer until I read about pre-visualization on a famous blogger's site. Now I spend hours, even days, meticulously planning for the end result.

 

Before reading (yet again) about pre-visualization I might have walked by this point in space and casually turned, clicked the camera shutter and then walked on by. But now armed with the knowledge that all the really, really good, super smart photographers rigorously pre-visualize every square millimeter of every image they take I have changed my slothful ways and adopted a wholly new practice. 

I woke up one morning, soon after diving into an exhaustive article about the process of pre-visualization and in my mind I had a vision of what this scene should look like if I applied the needed rigor to my once cavalier approach to enjoying the taking of photographs. I had missed the part in my photo education which clearly states that obsession with minutia and a desperate need to control the nearly uncontrollable flow of the universe is almost mandatory if your work is to be taken seriously. 

To that end I started by establishing the GPS coordinates for the scene I had seen in my dreams. Once that was entered into my notebook I drove over to look at the location and the assemblage of safety railings, roadways and retaining walls. This scouting was broken up over the course of three different days, each taking several hours, during which I took many scouting shots and took notes about the angles that I thought most closely replicated the dream state image. Once I'd made a thorough mapping of the space via numerous overlapping images I went back to the studio to begin laying out the material on a large board and brought out a graphing calculator so I could compute the perfect location in the X/Y coordinates. Back to the scene I went with a measuring tape, a laser rangefinder and a can of yellow spray paint. 

After careful measurements to ensure that my camera position would, indeed, give me the exact distance from the railings and at the exact exo-center of my overall composition I over-sprayed paint around my shoes and the tripod legs to make an exacting marker for future forays into this magic of pre-ordained imaging. 

The next thing I needed to do was to determine the exact required height for the nodal position of the taking lens on the camera. I could calculate that from the oil paintings I executed by memoried reference from my dreams of the scene. One of the great powers granted by pre-visualization. Persistence of potential reality...

But in doing the calculations for distance to the railing, accurate left to right positioning for the tripod and camera, and exacting calculations for the camera's nodal height and the angle of attack for the lens I realized that I hadn't carefully experimented with the best focal length to re-enact my original vision. 

I came back to the location again with a full rasher of lenses; from 16mm to 500mm and tried each one of them to see which would give me the exact appearance and perspective which I deemed would be vital for the success of the image. It was a close call with lenses from focal lengths of 45mms to about 60mms. I wasn't sure because there were no exact fits so I went back to home base and ordered a number of lenses in the limited range. I thought about zoom lenses but I wasn't sure I could get a zoom lens with the right final aperture. How sad it would have been to carefully and thoroughly pre-visiualize the image only to be laid low by the wrong aperture setting. 

Another round of trial and error with a small (ten) sampling of wide normal, near normal, normal, slightly longer normal and, an outlier, a 58mm focal length showed me that I was narrowing down the field of appropriate candidates. And don't get me started on the weeks and weeks of shooting test charts to determine just how much character and of what kind the final lens choice would need to deliver...

I finally had all the pieces together and went to the site to make initial photographs, fully understanding that an accurately, well and accurately pre-visualized end result might require many more return trips as I compensated for time of day and time of season. And meteorological conditions. I returned to the  site over and over again. In the steaming heat of the Summer, during days of driving rain, days of sleet, and even one day of an ice storm which paralyzed the rest of the city, but on no single occasion did all of the parts come together for me. I quit my job to be more available to the changing conditions that would lead to the perfect result. Then I realized that I might never be able time the shot so that a random car was in the right spot on the right day, at the right time. So I hired a car and a driver and had them on call for weeks at a time. 

Today was the day. The weather was gray and damp. There was a perfect mist in the air. I called the driver and had him rush to a rally point a block away from the location on the roadway that was mandated by the pre-visualization. I set up the tripod, the camera, the lens and the point of focus that was the result of weeks of mathematical calculations based on Bamburger's Construct of Alternate Conscious Displacement which predicates that exacting locations have a singularity that calls to the artist. I waited for traffic to dissipate after the lunch rush and counted on several friends at the top of the route in question to radio me with minute-by-minute traffic analyses. At the critical moment I called the driver and he set out onto the course in a carefully rehearsed automotive choreography. 

As I watched the car approach I readied myself for the exact moment of clarity and resolution. 

I clicked one perfect frame on two vetted memory cards and held my breath for a moment as I reviewed the file. Then it was off to the studio to go through the pre-visualized processing steps that would bring the vision I had so clearly in my mind, now months earlier, into reality. So, one perfect photo can equal months and months of incredible work, trial and error, the loss of any contact with social reality and so on. But it's all worth it because I'll finally be able to write, with a straight face, that this is the result that I wanted all along. That I had, in fact, pre-visualized it.

And here I thought some photographers were just good at making up this crap, after having mindlessly grabbed a shot, in order to make it seem as though their image was imbued with some greater value or that they had a more cogent idea of how to "make" photographs than everyone else. 

Yes, of course, it's all bullshit. As is most of the stuff one reads about pre-visualization outside the studio. I guess some people need to continually justify their indecision about when and why to click a shutter. But previsualization is akin to trying to plan to fall in love with a complete stranger who is mostly out of your league.

Don't fall for it. And if you believe in the power of previsualization there's probably no help for you. You are in a cult...