Vision: Interview with Vitaliy

Well, it’s Thurs­day and I thought today would be a great day for you to hear from Vitaliy. He makes my life sunny on even the cloud­i­est of days so let’s see what he can do for you. I’ve been workin’ him like a dog the past few weeks so he’s sprawled out on the couch right now as I we start our dis­cus­sion. Enjoy!

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So you came up with the idea to talk about vision today. Why is vision impor­tant in your photography?

As a pho­tog­ra­pher, I often am being asked the fol­low­ing ques­tions. What cam­era did you use to take that pic­ture? What lens did you use? What kind of cam­era set­tings did you have when you took that shot? These are all legit­i­mate ques­tions, how­ever, when it comes to the essence of pho­tog­ra­phy, cam­era set­tings, lenses, and post pro­cess­ing are all but tools in the hands of a pho­tog­ra­pher to help him achieve his vision. Any mem­o­rable pho­to­graph starts with a pho­to­graphic vision. Inten­tion­al­ity and plan­ning are a big part of what makes a pho­to­graph suc­cess­ful. Does the sub­ject that you pho­to­graph move you in a cer­tain way? What is it about the sub­ject that you find most inter­est­ing or mem­o­rable? What you include inside the frame or leave out of the frame, will help to com­mu­ni­cate your vision.

Do you come up with a vision before a pho­to­shoot or wed­ding, or is it some­thing that hap­pens dur­ing the process of photographing?

I think that it’s both. Plan­ning ahead can help you achieve your vision with less stress. How­ever, no vision needs to be set in stone. Pho­tog­ra­phy, like any form of art, requires inspi­ra­tion and con­nec­tion with your sub­ject. Some­times I get inspired by some­thing the bride wears dur­ing the wed­ding or by the inter­ac­tion of a bride and her dad. I’ve learned to look around me and let the envi­ron­ment and cir­cum­stances help me com­mu­ni­cate my vision.

It sounds like your are say­ing that vision, in a sense, is sto­ry­telling. Are they the same? If not, what ways do they differ?

Sto­ry­telling is just an aspect of your vision. Whether words or pic­tures, they’re used to com­mu­ni­cate what your orig­i­nal inten­tion was. Vision pre­cedes sto­ry­telling because it deter­mines how the story can be told.

What was your vision in the image above? How did it come about?

Ser­gio and Lisa are close friends of ours. When they asked us to pho­to­graph their fam­ily, we were thrilled. As you prob­a­bly all know, our favorite pic­tures usu­ally are those of the hus­band and wife. So we started off with a nice pic­ture of Ser­gio and Lisa smil­ing at the cam­era. Pho­tograph­ing peo­ple is all about rela­tion­ships. So as I was pho­tograph­ing them, Can­dace and I were talk­ing with them. One thing that Lisa and I have in com­mon is our her­itage. Some­how old Ukrain­ian pho­tographs were brought up and we were jok­ing about how Ukraini­ans don’t nor­mally smile in their pho­tographs and they’re seri­ous. This is what birthed the vision for this pho­to­graph. I wanted to recre­ate a some­what exag­ger­ated ver­sion of an old Ukrain­ian pho­to­graph. Obvi­ously, not all Ukrain­ian pho­tographs look like this.

So the image on the left is straight out of the cam­era and the image on the right is the final pic­ture. Is post pro­cess­ing part of your vision?

Yes, def­i­nitely. I wanted this photo to have a warn and faded look as if it could have been found in an old fam­ily album. That was part of my orig­i­nal vision when I took the pic­ture, but my vision couldn’t be com­pleted unless I did the post pro­cess­ing to give it that look.

What did you do in post process to achieve this look?

It started actu­ally before post process. I used a stan­dard 50mm lens to take this pic­ture because old cam­eras used fixed lenses and some­what wide lenses. I wanted it to have a look that it could have been pho­tographed with an old cam­era. In post process, I applied a tex­ture to the image to give it an old pho­to­graph look with dis­tressed edges. Then to give it a vin­tage tone, I used one of the vin­tage actions in Pho­to­shop called Troy from Totally Rad Actions 2 — The Revenge!.Then I added a red gra­di­ent on the left of the pho­to­graph to make it look like the cam­era that this pho­to­graph was taken with leaked light onto the film.

What did you hope the viewer would see or feel when they looked at this image?

In con­trast with all the other images we took of Sergio’s fam­ily, this one stands out as an odd one. That was pre­cisely what I wanted to do. I wanted the view­ers to notice it because it has a spe­cial mean­ing to me. My vision was to com­mu­ni­cate a part of me really, to com­mu­ni­cate a his­toric aspect of my her­itage. But I wanted to have fun with the image. I wanted the viewer to smile at the exag­ger­a­tion of it all.