The Anticipation of Arrival - with a camera ...
Arrival at a new film location or photography site is for me a delicious experience, pregnant with the anticipation of a new image. It is an ecstatic welcoming of the possibility of capture. Not of light but of composition. Light is changing constantly, it is illusive, more so at sunrise and sunset. You can't really control exterior light only compliment and direct it. But with compositions you can intervene and assume creative control inside a frame. My preference has always been a wide aspect ratio. (min 16:9) I have noticed that compositions, when they begin to form, often arise without my conscious awareness even before I set up a tripod.
On good days (when in the FLOW zone ) this seems to be a function of some kind of optical triangulation that the brain is computing ahead of the shot, as you walk into the site. Into not onto (a site) because even though a frame is a 2 dimensional composition, you are in a 3 dimensional physical reality. On good days I feel internally directed as to where to set up. Normally you should try to restrain this decision, because once you set a camera on top of a fixed tripod you begin to find every reason to keep it there, in that one place. This is why all the great outdoor photographers will advise you to work the location first, meaning use your legs and eyes to explore the angles, move around examine pov's, don't do the tourist point and shoot' thing on first encounter.
I've watched this happen so many times in the Piazza della Rotonda where the mighty Pantheon stands. You can arrive there from one of ten directions, small alley streets that suddendly spit you out in front of this majestic building. Almost without exception tourist groups upon first sighting it will stop in their tracks, reach for their iphone/ipad/camera and click. It's an example to me of what I call the unconscious camera.
Arrival in a new location is also about surrendering to the FLOW experience I mentioned before, hacking into that creative zone helps you be mindful of the present moment, and to trust the process. It helps you detatch from the result and yet assists you to make a photograph. I say make because I don't think you take a photo. You don't steal a photo or rip it from nature, and it's not given to you. No photograph was ever just hanging there in mid air for you to take with you. You make a picture with the light that's available at the time, and with the tiny fragment of the world that you choose to frame for a still image, or the start of a a camera movement. These choice decisions are influenced by your imagination, how you feel at the time and where you happen to be. You create an image that exists in your imagination only. Then you capture it in your camera, but it doesn't really exist out there ... That's the magic of it.
photo: First time arrival at the Bay of Naples (shot by @SaveRome )
