Learning to Compose (3): Reimagining

Martin Turner (Martin Turner)
Keywords: learning_to_compose, martin_turner
= 5.0 (3) \2This is the third part of a series on Learning to Compose.

Learning to Compose Part 2: Reimagining

From what you got to what your mind sees

When you see something, your eye responds to it. This is purely biological. The eye responds to dark and light, to red and green, and to blue and yellow. Without you thinking about it, your eye flicks around, building up an image of what you see. If you decide to really look, you can do this consciously, but your eye is doing this all the time even when you aren’t thinking about it. The eye’s sensors, which are called ‘rods’ and ‘cones’ have different light sensitivity. The light-shade receptors can operate in much lower light. That’s why things look more monochrome in the dark. Like a camera, the eye opens and closes aperture based on how much light is available.

Going from a mockup to the real thing, we want to reimagine how to portray this classic vehicle
Click for an enlargement


But then something else happens. While your visual cortex is looking after the capturing of the image, another part of your mind gets to work. it recognises the intrinsic shape, colour and lines, and it places things in space, using the information from two eyes working together. It also works through a vast collection of memories, so when you see something which is painted red, you ‘know’ it’s painted red, without having to wonder how you know it. But there’s more. Your mind also applies a layer of meaning and emotion. You go from what the eye sees to what the thing is to what it means to you.

Most photographers start off capturing what is there. After a while, most of us learn to work with colour, light, shade and form to produce a visually pleasing result. But photography genuinely becomes art (or functionally useful, if you’re doing it as part of an advertising campaign) when we communicate what it means to us. A picture of a sunset or a flower is beautiful, but it doesn’t in itself communicate any meaning.

Finding infinity in photography is about discovering how to communicate what a particular scene means to you, rather than just what you see.

In this article, we’re going to explore one journey in reimagining an image.

While we’re doing this, we’re going to understand the difference between three ways we interpret an image:

• Intrinsic — what it is and looks like
• Implicit — what its shape implies about its meaning
• Associative — how it associates with ideas we already have

The Yellow Land Rover

I want to look at a photography project I worked on a few years back. I won’t go into the reasons behind it, but I actually bought an old Land Rover with the intention of taking pictures of it.

If you’re not from the UK, the significance of the Land Rover (and not one of the recent Land Rover-made SUVs) might escape you. But this is a much-loved vehicle which instantly connects you to any farmer you happen to meet, any off-roader, and anyone who loves old cars. In other countries, other vehicles have that resonance.

Here’s the first shoot we did with it:

Click for an enlargement


As you can see, we’ve already done a little bit of work—simply cropping it into panorama format begins to tell a story. But the image is static.

This image shows you things which are intrinsic to Land Rovers: the size, the shape, the colour (in this unusual case). It also places it in-situ. But, unless you know and love Land Rovers, it is unlikely to be reaching you.

So here’s the second try.

Click for an enlargement


This is a more exciting image, but, unless you love Land Rovers, it probably doesn’t really touch you. Even so, we’ve now moved on from merely showing the intrinsic to also the implicit. Off-roading is now demonstrated, not just expected. But, the thing is, although this looks like it’s quite interesting for the driver of the vehicle, ti doesn’t do anything for the viewer. It remains an illustration. The image has little power, if any.

That was all we had time for during that shoot, but I wasn’t satisfied, and so we came back to it a few months later. Sometimes you need to look at images you’ve shot and not just review them, as we looked at in the last article, but actively reimagine them.

Five obvious ways to recreate an image:

• Change the lighting
• Change the proportions
• Change the angle of view
• Change the shutter speed
• Change the bokeh

These are very much things you can do there and then.

But what about more creative way?

• Change the foreground
• Change the background
• Change the secondary interest
• Change the point of focus
• Change the point of attention

In this case, reimagining then took a fair bit of planning. Having found a suitable wet day, we set off with a laptop, tethering cable, D800, Df (to document it), and a Profoto B2 light capable of overpowering the sun. I’d also read some articles about shooting automotive.

Some of the things we wanted to express were the wetness of rain, the stickiness of mud, the look of the vehicle from low down when it’s more imposing, and the general drama that goes with setting off with one of these late at night into floods and high winds.

These are all associations that exist in my mind for this vehicle, but maybe not in your mind. We can often rely on people’s associations if it’s a thing which everyone sees in the same way. That’s why social media is full of pictures of kittens and food. We can be certain that almost everyone responds in the same way to kittens, food, sunsets, flowers and tiny smiling babies. But we haven’t achieved anything photographically by making use of that shared vocabulary.



Wet and computers don’t go well together, and we eventually had to finish the shoot when it began to rain again. We subsequently bought a pop-up laptop shelter.
Click for an enlargement



I’d been experimenting with light painting for a few years. In this case, the plan was to tether the camera and keep it locked, and to move the light around. To get the levels we needed, this was a series of strobe flashes, not one long light as you might use at night.
Click for an enlargement



Two people are required for this. One to operate the tethered camera, and the other to move the light.
Click for an enlargement



This has to be previsualised: even using Photoshop on the laptop to do a quick composite, it still has to be in your mind first.
Click for an enlargement



We produced fourteen shots all in all, thought they weren’t all used in the final composite.
Click for an enlargement


We produced fourteen shots all in all, thought they weren’t all used in the final composite.

This is what we finally got, compositing down in Photoshop and masking out various parts of the image:

Click for an enlargement

Conclusion:

While we’ve looked at things you can change, reimagining is not and can never be working through a series of mechanical options, like applying Photoshop styles or your favourite plugins. You have to keep asking the question: will others see it as I see it?

One principle for reimagining:

“How can I convey what this scene says to me so that the viewer sees it the way I see it?”

Sometimes you need to put the image out there, and see what kind of responses you get. At times, there will be such an overwhelming response to some association that you weren’t aware of that people just can’t see it your way, because they’re seeing it through a TV-ad, movie shot, Facebook meme or popular joke. There’s a time when you have to take an image which is absolutely perfect, and put it back in the shoebox, and reimagine again.

Author : Martin Turner Link: https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/le...ing_to_compose