Seeking Your Own Vision

I apologize to you who follow this blog for not posting last week. There simply was not time. Running our workshops is intensive, as we want to give as much time to our participants as possible. As you might imagine, our days are long. We get up to take advantage of the gorgeous pre-dawn light as well as sunrise. After several hours of imaging back at our base, we head out again to enjoy the late-afternoon light, sunset, and again, that magical light that happens after sunset.

One of the things that is interesting in our workshops, is watching the changes in approach in our students. We try to show them that there is usually more to a scene than what first meets the eye. We want them to seek their own vision.

For those of you who have been following this blog, I wrote an article about Selecting a Photo Workshop in which I described one workshop we ran into where people spilled out of a couple of vans and set their tripods up right next to each other, all facing in the same direction. Hardly seeking your own vision!

We were proud of our students and the vision they found. We pushed them to do shots other than the pretty-postcard ones, to try to treat an oft-photographed scene in a different way, pointing out different possibilities.

And instead of standing eye level to the tripod, we encourage different vantage points. After all, a different viewpoint will catch the viewer's eye more than the standard, eye-level shot.

Even when two people are photographing essentially the same scene, their vantage points may be different.

And the interpretation of the scene may be quite different, to wit these ones from a different location by two different participants...

Or two from another location...

Part of each person's vision includes how he/she envisions an image processed. These three student treatments of the same scene, for example, are totally different...

Sometimes, in seeking one's own vision, one finds subjects that are not the obvious ones for the location...

This last shot, by the way, comes with a bit of a story. We were up at Delicate Arch, waiting for the light to get better. I had been encouraging the participants who had joined me to get down for a different view. Finally, one lowered his tripod, adjusted his position, and asked if I would mind moving to the left a tad.

"Or course, not," I said, followed quickly by, "Can you wait a minute? There's a raven heading straight toward me."

The raven in question landed about four feet away from me, obviously accustomed to people. I have a habit of talking to the animals. Just call me Eliza! I quorked at my new friend, and he quorked back. We did this for a while, and he was charming, lowering his head repeatedly and puffing out his ruff. I started making that knocking sound they do. He repeated, and we conversed back and forth for a good twenty minutes, much to the amusement of the crowd lining the ridge. Bit by bit, he inched closer to me, so he was finally a mere two feet from my feet. I kept hoping that wouldn't decide that my painted toe nails were worthy of inspection.

The raven got increasingly more insistent, until one kind-hearted soul tossed a piece of apple to him. He stayed with us for a good three-quarter of an hour and finally flew away.

Arnie and I actually got to photograph a little. Here is one of my different views, my vision.

So, when you go out photographing, think about what you want out of your image. How do you want to treat it? Is it going to be a color one or black and white? See it in your mind's eye. Seek your own vision.