(c) 2009 Whitney Klare
I’ve mentioned my friend Whitney, Rudy’s granddaughter, and her passion for photography. She’s sent me a few samples of her work, and with her permission, I’d like to share them with you. She’s already an accomplished photographer, with a great eye for composition and design. From her work, I’m beginning to see that she has a strong interest in abstracts, in using the many tools of digital photography to create a vision of an alternate reality.
This got me thinking about how even when our intent is to create an image that doesn’t exist in our physical world, all of the skills and creative processes of photography still apply.
Being “old school”, and learning all of this well before digital came on the scene, I’ve been well trained in “getting it right in the camera”. Even with film and print-making, there are plenty of options for manipulating the image. But starting out and working with a pre-visualized result in mind is a true mark of your skills.
It’s valuable and important to develop your ability to do it “the right way”, both in shooting and in image processing and making adjustments, not to satisfy some “rule”, but because it gives you so much more control over getting the results you want.
Even with an abstract, and much more so as your images come closer to a vision of “reality”, being able to pre-visualize the shot you want, and understanding and working with the elements of light, composition and design to get those results at each step, makes your work that much more powerful.
(c) 2009 Whitney Klare
A true testament to your skills is to be able to visualize an image that isn’t there in front of you, shoot it and adjust it so that the final result makes people believe that it is the reality that was there. That’s when they say “Wow, how did you get such an amazing shot – I’ve never seen it look like that!” (Whatever “it” is).
Those of us from the “old school”
realize that it was Ansel Adam’s not-so-secret print-making work, together with an exact system of exposing and processing his film that created the magnificent images that he pre-visualized.
So keep shooting, keep experimenting, and keep learning and developing your skills.
