Your imagination is what make the world in front of the camera to be transformed into a photograph. Imagination is both the ability of the mind to imagine, and the part of the mind where images exist. So it is really important in photography. Imagination for a photographer is the key to success.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
mark twain
To make a photograph is a creative process, for this reason imagination is really important. There are a lot of element involved making a quality image with the final purpose to tell a good story. Light, colors contrasts, the subject of the image, camera settings, depth of field are some of the elements involved in this visual creative process.
The photo that you took with your camera is the imagination you want to create with reality.
Scott Lorenzo
If the photographer has a good story to tell and knows how to express his/her feeling and emotion through the image using imagination the work is almost done.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
albert einstein
Thought vs Imagination.
Thought and imagination can be easily confused due to the appeared similarity of they meaning. Anyway they are different. Thought refers to a mental process that may happen also without control. On the opposite side imagination is a voluntary thought made by an effort.
For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions.
federico fellini
To have a good photograph use imagination.
As imagination is a voluntary thought made by an effort, use it! Every time you are making pictures think about the story you want to tell through the photographs you are going to make. Choose the right framing and composition to have a better quality image. The light and the colors will help you to convey the right message to the beholder of the photograph. Trough the right camera settings you can choose the depth of field you want for your image and freeze the right fraction of time.
The imagination helps you, as a photographer, to express your sense of the world, to give articulation to the meaning of your images.
For me, great pictures are about storytelling. I want to learn something from the picture or want to evoke some kind of emotion. I want it to take me somewhere.
Steve McCurry
In fact photography is about using your imagination to create compelling images. Images made trough ideas that speak to people and attract the interest of the viewer.
As a photographer you can use your images to express your feeling and emotion, to show others your style. And for this reason you need creativity and imagination. Tanks to your imagination you can master the medium of photography in a way it can serve your narrative and your storytelling.
Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.
Edward Steichen
I think this is the reason why make photograph is easy for everyone except for photographers. Making a photograph for a photographer involves this effort of creativity to make compelling image capable to tell the story he/her want communicate.
Creativity and imagination.
You may think “am I creative?”. My answer is “yes!”. Being creative is part of being human. Being curious, lose yourself in a train of thought, connect things while you compose an image, express emotion are all example of creativity.
Creativity is the ability to follow your thought and make a photograph starting from nothing. Creativity is the ability to create something from nothing, trough imagination and thought that make the creative process.
Imagination breaks down reality to invent it in different way, sometimes weird others ingenious. It is like closing your eyes and shape the impossible just using your mind. With imagination you go beyond reality and make something different that is your vision, never the truth.