Previsualization and Professional Photography

The Photopreneur blog recently had an article about The Differences Between Professional and Amateur Photographers. The article lists important points like business and marketing skills, but I chimed in a comment that I had been meaning to blog about here as well regarding previsualization.

To really be a professional you have to be able to CREATE images on demand in any circumstance with any subject matter. This goes far beyond just snapping the camera when something that is obviously a good pictures happens to be in front of it.

One of the most important skills to make that leap is previsualization, the ability to imagine precisely what you want to capture in a picture beforehand. Sometimes this means previsualizing a scene a few seconds before you adjust the elements within it, the lighting, and/or your own position to capture it. Other times it means previsualizing a scene in another country before you even arrive on location to shoot it and then capturing it exactly as you had planned.

Plus, you have to back it up with the technical skills to make it happen. Amateurs tend to make an effort to improve their technical skills solely for the purpose of capturing a better exposure for whatever just happens to be in front of them. Professionals add technical skills to their toolbox and use them as a means to an end in achieving a previsualized goal.

Previsualization brings together all of the creative side of professional photography: creativity + technical skills + research + hard work.

For more on this topic, every photographer should be familiar with the late Galen Rowell's Created Images article originally published in Outdoor Photographer in September 1999. (His website does not allow me to link directly to the article, but you can click here and scroll down to it.) In it, he discusses his four-part visualization scale. Though he speaks in context of nature photography, the points of the article apply to all photographic genres.