The Mind’s Eye…Well Worth Any Writer’s Time Developing

It Actually Worked

During the course of the next few years, I gave myself an exercise. To find a scene, shoot it the way I saw it in my mind’s eye and then write a little piece about it, describing it.
What this did, rather quickly, was turn my mind’s eye into an approximation of a 16 by 9 lens. Eventually, when I confronted a scene in a screenplay I was writing, I was able to close my eyes and see much more detail than I could before I started using the camera to capture images.

Two Ancillary Benefits

1. This particular skill helped me in terms of strengthening the visualization skills I needed in my advertising career. Up to this point, I was known a writer of powerful headlines and copy. But as I got further along with the photography, I started to see ‘whole ads’ with visual ideas.


While I would never abandon the idea of working with an art director in the agency business, I was certainly able to contribute a lot more to the visual side, which is something the art directors I worked with all appreciated.
2. I actually became a photojournalist. It started with an art director named Robert Priest who was the Creative Director for Weekend Magazine, which was a full-colour roto supplement to one of the main Toronto newspapers. He called me one day and asked me to bring in my portfolio. I told him I didn’t have one, that I would be happy to give him a slide show.
For the next two years, he sent me all over Canada photographing the famous and the infamous, ballerinas, doctors, lawyers, politicians writers and actors.
I would have continued working for him but he got a new job as art director of Rolling Stone magazine and was off to New York and budgets to use people like Annie Liebovitz, Harry Benson, and Art Kane.
This credential led to a lot of agency work, mostly shooting real people for testimonial campaigns and some more magazine and record company work shooting music people.

From Amateur To Pro To Amateur Again

Being a writer first and foremost, I never really lost sight of my principal objective in learning photography in the first place.
And so, after three years of gallivanting around the city and the country making money with my hobby, I went back to work in the agency business, took down my shingle, but did not put away my camera.
What I did was start to create themes for myself.The most enjoyable was shooting mannequins at downtown department stores. Most of this photography required long exposures and therefore a tripod setup.
Fortunately back then, windows were much more creatively designed than they are these days, and I had lots of source material, and the beauty of it was that it changed more or less every week.
At one point my mannequins had a feature spread in Canadian Photo magazine and this attracted the attention of one of the senior people at McLean Hunter (Canada’s largest publisher). He took a bunch of my shots down to New York and tried to sell another publisher on doing a coffee table book, which we titled “Ladies In Waiting”.
It was very well received but the timing was off because there were a lot of celebrities like Diane Keaton and Jeff Bridges who were doing large format books for this publisher. But I was just thrilled that anybody would believe my hobby shots were worth a trip to New York.

That Was Then. This Is Now.

I rejoiced when digital photography came along, because I was then able to sell off all my bulky 35 mm camera gear and invest in a new digital camera, which was light and easy to carry around.
I was taking a lot fewer pictures by that time, but never really lost interest in the craft. And frankly, I owe it a lot. Over the past 20 years, I have art directed, about 80% of all the on and off line work that I have done. And I honestly feel that my writing has been strengthened immensely by the visual skills I have developed through my intense relationship with photography.
This is a course of action I would recommend to any writer who is looking to strengthen their abilities.
That and, of course, learning the proper use of punctuation.
Header Pic: The trusty little Sony Cybershot that goes with me everywhere. I’m dropping hints that I would like a new one for my birthday.

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