The Curse of ‘Pre-Visualisation’

Doug Chinnery

Doug Chinnery is a fine art photographer, workshop leader and lecturer with a particular interest in the transformative opportunities of landscape photography.

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Have you felt it? That feeling of being of being in the right place… at the wrong time? Arriving for a much anticipated session making images at long dreamed of location only to realise that the elements have conspired against you (again) and the hoped for conditions are not to be?

Of course you have, we all have.

Whom shall we blame? The weather gods? Cruel beings who toy with us, sometimes tantalising us with photographic wonder, more often than not turning off the lights on their way out. We could blame other photographers, the likes of Joe Cornish, Mark Littlejohn and Guy Tal who so obviously have their own weather systems which follow them around, over which they seemingly have total control and can produce mist, golden light or whatever conditions they require at will to produce an endless stream of glorious images - there can be no other explanation for their wonderful output, right?

Or, perhaps, we could vent our venom on the curse of ‘pre-visualisation’. Those days spent at our day job, when we should have been doing something productive (from the point of view of our boss) but in reality we were dreaming of being out with the camera, picturing the location, the magnificent light, the mirror reflections in the water, the compositions we would make, the wind in our face, the awards we would win - all now not to be.

Then there is the guy (and I’m not being sexist here because, even though I am not a betting man, I would put good money on it being a man) who one day, somewhere, back in the mists of photographic time decided for us that the only light in which beauty could be captured in an image was during two or three hours of ‘golden’ light a day, and if that golden light should fail to materialise then all that remained for the photographer was to let shoulders slump, heart sink and to turn their backs on the landscape and trudge home in defeat.