In landscape photography, seeing the world in front of your eyes is essential. Of course, the technique is also important, but it is just the foundation for expressing what you see, your vision of the world, to the photograph’s viewer.
By training your eyes, you become more aware of light, color, lines, depth of field, and shapes and how to use your camera to capture these to make compelling landscape photographs able to express your voice as an artist. This awareness is essential because it allows you to convey your vision, meaning, and feelings about what you see in front of your lens.
Art is an end in itself, technique a means to that end; one can be taught, the other cannot
Edward Weston
Visualization
Visualization is the essential element in creating an expressive photograph. Through visualization, the photographer can picture the essence of the final image in his/her mind. Ansel Adams defines visualization as “a conscious process of projecting the final photographic image in the mind before taking the first steps in actually photographing the subject.” Visualization happens when imagination meets technique: when you perceive a compelling subject and also become aware of its potential as an expressive photograph.
We go outside to make landscape photography because of the transformation of a visual encounter with the world into a great photograph. And the resulting image is nothing but the product of the photographer’s vision, the way he perceived reality, and how he felt at that moment.
A photograph is the final result of a sensitive and receptive mind and a well-executed sequence of actions in the field and during the editing process. If interested, you may also read this other article about imagination in photography.
Art is an interpreter of the inexpressible, and therefore it seems a folly to try to convey its meaning afresh by means of words
Goethe
The visual information is a representation of reality
Thousands of photographs flow daily across your mobile phones, tablets, and computer screens. Yet, we often find ourselves unmoved by the overwhelming quantity of images we see daily. Anyway, the visual image is potent. This is because our brain absorbs and incorporates visual information faster than other information. The visual image is powerful because we don’t perceive it as a representation of reality, as we do with paintings or different arts genres. But we consider a photograph as a fragment captured from reality.
The photographs seem to have a more innocent and accurate relationship with visible reality than paintings. But it is not as we think. Photography has the same shady relationship between art and truth.
Visualization and reality
The creativity of photography relies on this infinite range of choices that the photographer has about how he wants to make his/her interpretation of reality. Any photograph is just an interpretation of reality as it can’t replicate all the range of brightness of most subjects. Through visualization and all the creative process steps, the photographer can choose between a more literal representation of reality and a more free representation of it.
The photo that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.
Scott Lorenzo
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
Through visualization, the process of seeing the image in his/her mind, and all the equipment settings, the photographer produces the final image, which is an artistic representation of reality.
Today with the advance in technology with the market releasing new cameras every year, the relative disappearance of the teaching of the classics masters of photography and the possibility of seeing the photograph an instant after pressing the shutter visualization may seem less critical than in the past. But today, visualization is as important as it was in the past. If you forget any vital step of the process while taking the photo, the result won’t be satisfying.
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Ansel Adams