zooms change field of view, feet change perspective.
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Or you have children, who don’t care for the right position…
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I don’t think I’ll ever buy a 50mm prime. It just looks too ‘normal’… 
Funny, it’s the movement of children that got me back to photography. But, that was about point&shoot cameras that took their good time between button-press and shutter-open; by then, children had moved on and we had a nice picture of the floor… 
Bought the D50 to remedy that, and the rest is, well, inevitability…
The large peaks at the two ends of your histogram could also be interpreted as:
- the 24 mm peak represents all the shots you took at 24 mm because it was what you wanted plus all the shots you would have preferred a shorter focal length.
- the 70 mm peak represents all the shots you took at 7- mm because it was what you wanted plus all the shots you would have preferred a longer focal length.
Was that the case?
Pretty much, for that part of the morning. I did go back to the truck and get my 70-300 for a few things I made a note of as I walked about with the 24-70; they’re not included in the histogram.
I don’t know if this is from being a writer or what, but I always found I produced my best writing when i could literally see the scene in my head and move through it.
But you can do it, because pre-visualization can be done while you’re standing at the scene. Also, I think digital photography has freed us from a lot of the classic Ansel Adams pre-visualization type of work. With black and white (and to a lesser extent color) film, once needed to determine a lot of the artistic decisions before clicking the shutter. When I was shooting b&w film, before I clicked the shutter I had already noted the contrast and development time that the film would need. With digital we don’t need to do that, we need only consider composition, depth of field, and capturing the full tonal range of the scene (via a single frame or bracketing). We can then make way more tonal adjustments in the digital darkroom.
More and more now, since I don’t have the time to spend hours randomly roaming around, I will use the satellite view in google maps, along wit h specific tags on photo sites, and a sun calculator to try and figure out what the scene will look like before I get there. I try to imagine the angle and quality of the light striking the object I want to photograph. I try to figure out a few frames before I ever get there. I guess this counts as pre-visualizatoin.
If you can quantify what you like about your own work, what you’re attracted to, then this kind of feedback loop can help you while you’re out shooting. I don’t know of anyone who has that high of a keeper rate. Mine has improved as I’ve improved my craft, but its still like 1/10 or 1/20 is a keeper.
You can exercise the compositional part of your brain, even if you don’t go out and shoot. Look at others’ work.
For a while I had cut shapes out of paper and would arrange them on the table. If I found something pleasing, i’d try to figure out why. Maybe you even take a photo of your arrangement.
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I have this, too. The only time I can actually see things in my mind is when I’m just falling asleep. I read somewhere that visualization in dreams happens in a different part of the brain than ‘normal’, waking visualization.
Lucky you to have this ability. I love to read but wish I could do this.
I think that’s called “seeing” 
Yes – regular review of my own output and that of others has helped in this regard.
I’ve read a book that discusses composition in this way – Picture This: How Pictures Work – it’s definitely useful to consider composition in simple ways like this.
What happens if you look at a scene and try to “see” it in black and white? Or just expose it differently high key, low key? Can you understand the effect of these parameters by looking at a scene with your eyes?
I can do it but it’s not stable, takes work and practice and I would hesitate to say that I “see” it. I guess I sort of do as I understand how it could look but my feeling it’s more like a memory. I cant freely focus on everything at once. If i do the whole scene the understanding would be blurry. Doing parts I can get more fidelity. Seems to map well to who we actually process visuals which is different from the complete freeze and evenness of a photograph.
I’m not sure I can even begin to work out how to do this but perhaps it’s something that comes with practice (something I usually don’t consistently have time for). I normally do these sorts of things by experimentation in post-processing.
Then I guess we do function differently. It was difficult from this discussion to understand what was semantics and what was actual difference. I have to emphasize though that for me it’s very fleeting and hard to “grip” but I can certainly imagine quite well how a scene would look like black and white.
Always very difficult to put into words what’s going on inside a person’s head. I have no idea if you see blue the same way I do, for example. I’m still not sure I’m able to explain it well.
Just curious: @elstoc, do you see the scenes vividly when you read? I do, even though (as I mentioned before) I also have problems with the ‘pre-visualise the final photograph’ advice.
No. I see no mental images. Perhaps occasionally vague impressions of an overall scene or parts of it if well described. But fleeting and vague as if viewed through a thick fog (for want of a better description). I have trouble calling such impressions “images” but I can’t find a better way to describe.
There’s a Vividness of Mental Imagery questionnaire that has a 1-5 scale from “like normal vision” to “no image”. I suppose I’m probably 4-5 on most questions.
I score higher on things I’ve photographed and heavily edited.
No. If you are making a photograph of a flower, and you know you want to increase the yellow saturation and decrease the green to feature the petals over the leaves, then you’ve pre-visualized.
If you merely see the flower, you’d say, “Oh a flower” and that would be the end of it.
Semantics really. Perhaps I could do this with small numbers of changes but I’m not visualising the result.
Hardly. If you know the steps you need to take to make the photo into something that resprsents your feelings/sentiments, then you pre-visualize. Whether you see the actual image in your head or not doesn’t matter.
When language is ambiguous both parties can be correct 
As one that also has aphantasia I think I undestand what elstoc is trying to say and what it is that you, paperdigits, is saying.
The term ‘pre-visualize’ means: To visualize or predict a result.
You are talknig about the predict part, which can be based on knowledge (I know that red and yellow make orange), and @elstoc and I are talking about the visualize part, which is actually “seeing” the result (I cannot see this orange I talked about).
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I have known at least two intelligent people who were so aphantasic that they said they could not read any work of fiction. Authors work very hard to use words to “draw” mental images, but these people stated that they absolutely could not visualize any of the things being described from the words. I also believe that both of these people had strong ADHD.
One of them was my father-in-law. I cringed when he read stories to my children, because they did not sound like stories, just strings of words with no emphasis or emotion.
The whole post you made points, seen from my aphantasia but non-medical back-grounded opinion, to deeper problems then just being unable to visualize what is written. The ADHD part might be the more dominant here and explain the problematic handling of the emotional parts that are shining through.
I love to read (99% being fiction), but as I mentioned in my first reply in this thread: This disorder does influence my reading to a certain extent. Although the genre does make a difference, I do believe that the writing style of the author is the key factor for me. How world-building is set up in Sci-Fi/Fantasy is an example.
I noticed over the years that authors that only set up a bare framework in their stories I tend not to be able to enjoy. On the other hand writers like, for example, Dan Simmons, China Miéville, Ted Chiang and Jeff VanderMeer are very good at putting onto paper what they envision. I’m not able to visualize it, but there’s enough of a filled in framework to enjoy it very much.
But that only tends to be important in Sci-Fi (space opera in particular), Fantasy, New weird and the likes. This issue isn’t al that present in, for example, novels like the Your Face Tomorrow volumes (Javier Marías) or The Waiting Years (Fumiko Enchi). These tend to focus on and describe human behaviour/interactions.
But in the end, the bottom line is this: Yes, aphantasia does influence reading and although I do not really know what I’m missing I do think I miss something essential.