Personal Pearls Of Wisdom: In A Perfect World, What If?

What if?

One of my favorite Pearls I’m always asking my online students with the BPSOP, and my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops is, “In a perfect world, what if?”.

What I mean is that if they could go back and re-take a photo they submitted and they were able to do anything different that they wanted, what would they do. If time and money were not an issue, what would they add or take away from their composition?

I’ll usually ask a student this question if I see something that might be distracting, perhaps an imbalance between the Negative and Positive space, or something they didn’t notice when they were composing by not using their “Fifteen Point Protection Plan”I gave them at the beginning of the online class or workshop.

I might mention it even if the photo doesn’t have any issues at all and was a well done image. The reason is simple, it’s an exercise of the mind. There’s several analogies I can offer up to you to explain just what I mean. Do you stretch before jogging? Do you hit a bucket of golf balls at the range before actually playing eighteen holes? What about ‘batting practice’?

These are all things people do before beginning whatever it is that they do to loosen up, getting the tempo in their swing at the right pace, or get their eye-hand coordination finely tuned before that ninety miles per hour fastball comes hurtling towards them.

The same thing can apply to photography. By imagining “what if”, you’re exercising your imagination. Perhaps it’s adding some red tail lights in a street scene at dusk, or a couple at the end of the pier, or someone doing something to add an editorial (storytelling) element. That extra something to move their photo “up a notch”.

Whether you could actually add or change something doesn’t really matter. The point is to practice using your imagination every chance you get. It’s going to keep your thought process sharpened just in case you might be able to make it happen sometime.

In the photo shown above, I was shooting for Apache Oil and Gas in Egypt, and was coming back from the Suez Canal when I saw this scene. I jumped out of the car and quickly set up my camera and tripod. As I was shooting I was also thinking (as I have done for over forty years) “what if”.

In that instance, I thought “what if” there was a telephone truck facing the camera with its headlights on parked right next to the tower in the foreground. There were two men on a Cherry Picker ( a device to lift people into the air) working on the transformer and silhouetted against the sky and the setting sun.

Now that would have been a picture that would be remembered!!!

Visit my new website at: www.joebaraban.com, and check out my new workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.

JoeB