FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
John Miskelly FRPS John believes that vision isn’t about sight, but rather, insight. It is what you see in your mind’s eye and, therefore, what you want to communicate through your images: The sense of finding your creative voice, which is simply about what you’re trying to say with your photographs. For John, it’s often more about what he feels when on location than what he actually sees at any particular moment. Understanding Vision As a photographer, it’s important to me to have a clear vision for what I’m trying to achieve with my images, yet vision is something that is rarely discussed by photographers. In this article, I’m going to consider what vision is, what it means to me and my photography and finally, I’ll discuss how this relates to some of my images.
Anyone who has attended one of my talks or been to one of my workshops will know that I talk a lot about having a ‘vision’. So, why do I consider vision to be so important? Well, vision is the place we all begin, the road we travel on the way to our goal of creating compelling photographs that express something we’ve no other means of expressing but through
Fishing Hut, Gironde Estuary, Bordeaux, France
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the frame of the image. I imagine that we can all identify with this goal, even if we haven’t given it much thought in the past. It’s most commonly the reason that we picked up the camera in the first place. I believe that vision isn’t about sight, but rather, insight. It is not the thing that others see, but what you see in your mind’s eye and, therefore, what you want to communicate through your images: That sense of finding your creative voice, which is simply about what you’re trying to say with your photographs. For me, it’s often more about what I ‘feel’ when I’m at a location than what I actually see at any particular moment. Some call it the art of seeing the invisible. In practical terms, my own vision involves capturing not just the ‘moment’, but a slice of time through my long exposure images, which are typically between 4 and 8 minutes in length. It’s where I aim to record what I felt whilst at the location; the actual sense of being there, the changes in the environment over the duration of my exposures. As such, my images aren’t based on realism as we tend to think of it, but rather, my own sense of being at a particular place at a specific time, to record the unique light and weather conditions that I experienced.
Landscape Magazine Summer 2021
