How to Strengthen Your Visualization Muscles and Find Inspiration

Continuing our dive into visualization, I want to explore how you can strengthen your Visualization muscles and find inspiration to help your work. For a good example, let’s look at Joey L. I interviewed him and he told me that really how he learned photography was looking at the works of the master painters. He noticed how they frame the image, but also their use of lighting. So you can see some of his images almost look like paintings?

He learned that from looking at the works of the painters. And that’s how you strengthen your visualization muscles, as we call it. Go out and look at art, ideally in a museum. If you can’t go to a museum, look at it in a book. If neither of these are options, you can go online. But that’s the last choice. It’s way better to look at the actual art hanging on the wall or printed in a book because you’re going to be much closer to what that artist really had in mind for you.

Looking at Art

When you look at it, take your notebook and make notes of what you see in that work of art. 

1. How was the subject composed within the frame? 
2. How were they lit? Where was the light coming from?
3. What was your eye drawn to?
4. What is its emotional impact?

I encourage you to do this right now and practice this exercise. You need to put in the hard work and strengthen your visualization muscles.

The Milkmaid

For an example, here is Vermeer and his painting of the Milkmaid.

First, how did he frame his subject? You’ll notice it’s pretty tight. It’s all really about the subject right here and the various things that surround her. The light source of course is one north facing window. And then what’s your emotional impact? What do you feel when you look at this? I get a feeling of sort of calmness, like she’s just going about her business.

I recommend you study Vermeer, Rembrandt and  a lot of different works of art. Here are a few of my recommendations for books to study.

Book Recommendations

The Family of Man. This is a collection of prints from an exhibition featuring 503 photographs from 68 countries. It was curated by Edward Steichen, a fantastic photographer. I highly recommend this book to see black and white photography around the world, and it was a major inspiration for me when I was young.

Arnold Newman is one of my favorite photographers and his Masterclass book is a great example of his work. He often breaks the “rule” of thirds. He found his own way to compose his images.

The last book I’ll mention is Masterworks of Modern Art. This is from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. And it’s all types of art, paintings, photographs. It has works from Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, and more. I find painting equally inspiring as photography. I often find ideas that can help me with my photography.

So I encourage you to check out these works and to find works that speak to you and help inspire you.

Watch the live stream based on this blog here.

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Be sure to keep an eye on our blog as we will be coming out with more posts on visualization and more. Also, using the links to Amazon of the books mentioned in this post will help support our work! It doesn’t cost you anything extra but does help support us.