EnquireA lot of authoratative photographic voices like to bang on about the importance of pre-visualisation. Hell, it readily fills chapter 10 or 11 of any advanced photography guidebook.
I mean it is important - but it gets presented as somekind of 6th sense, like there's a judgement in it - as if you can't see your image before you trip the shutter you're not a proper photographer.
My point is, it isn't always important to impose your own rigid ideas onto a subject, sometimes you trust the subject to tell the story you're anticipating; and you wait to see what exactly turns up.
In fact, it isn't even possible to pre-visualise an image like this one. It's a shot of an exceptionally twisted tree that has been duplicated, horizontally fliped, and merged back with the original.
I knew the introduced symmetry would close-up all kinds of lines and arcs to create a pattern of shapes. I could not predict what that pattern would be like in any detail. But now I see all kinds of shifting faces and figures amongst the branches as I look at the result. As I knew I would, because trees tell stories.
When you let them.
