Vocabulary

I have never had any formal training in photography, which to some degree I regret. I've had a lot of formal training in lots of other things, though, including quite a few piano lessons.

Something I have harped on in the past, and no doubt will harp on in future, is this idea of vocabulary. The idea is simply to have in your mind a large number of bits and pieces of the raw material of photographs. These are lighting idioms, compositional idioms, post-processing effects, tricks for getting the subject to smile, anything, and everything. You gain this vocabulary by looking at pictures, for the most part, but also by reading (or consuming other media) about photography and about how pictures are made, and by doing photography.

You wouldn't try to write a poem without knowing a lot of words. Even Dr. Geisel knew a lot of words, even though he used as few as 50 to write a book. Knowing a lot of words makes you comfortable with the ones you're using. It gives you a larger pool of words to pick from, even if you're only going to wind up using a few. If you don't know a lot of words, then you cannot pick the right word, for starters, and (this is the important part) you're going to have fewer ideas about what to say.

When you learn to play the piano in a formal setting, you learn a lot of notation. You learn a notation for playing notes in a so-called staccato fashion, where each note is struck very briefly and released immediately, making a short percussive TINK sound. Contrariwise, you learn notation which means to connect a series of notes together in a phrase, and to leave a perceptible space after before beginning the next phrase. More importantly, you learn that there is the possibility of degrees and of connectedness between notes. You learn to phrase staccato notes together. You can separate legato phrases. You learn that there are degrees of length of a note. While it may be notated as a quarter note, indicating that it should be played for such and such a time (relative to the pacing of the piece) but that you can shorten that a little or a lot, and that this will result in different results.

Working with a teacher, you spend a lot of time working out how you want to use these bits of vocabulary. How can I use these ideas of phrasing, and of playing this note slightly louder than that note, and a thousand other things, to express what I want to express. Glenn Gould, it may be assumed, had at his command the entire vocabulary of the piano. For a specific piece he might well have selected a fairly small subset, he was famous for his pointillist readings of Bach, heavy with a staccato touch. Surely, though, his ability to render a piece in this manner was supported by his complete command of legato, and everything else. His ability to play the same piece extremely fluidly surely allowed him to manage the pointillism better, to select the exact degree of pointillism he wanted.

More to the point, though, his understanding of the wider vocabulary gave him the raw material to choose from, to select pointillism where he felt it right, and to select a more fluid style where that better served the music. Without the ability to imagine and experiment with a wide array of sounds, how could he have best selected the sound that served his needs?

I submit that, without the deep vocabulary, Gould might never have found his pointillist interpretation.

This is, sadly, unknowable. There's simply no way anyone gets to be much good at playing the piano without a decent teacher, and a decent teacher will generally make sure that you have a deep vocabulary on hand. Vocabulary building is absolutely central to teaching music, and many other fine arts. There is not, as far as I am aware, any similar process in the teaching of photography, but fairly obviously there should be.

As I read and learn and think about the problems of inspiration, and of making pictures that you actually like, and so on, the more it becomes clear to me that vocabulary is terribly, terribly important in photography. You've got to know a lot of little things, to give you a rich pool of ideas and raw material. It is from this pool of ideas that your ideas will come. They may come in a single Eureka! moment, they might be teased out by a process of refinement, but without the large vocabulary you're not likely to have much success.

How do you get the vocabulary? The same way you get the one made of words. Mainly, you "read", secondarily, you "write". Look at a lot of pictures. Look up the "words" you don't know, by which I mean figure out how the thing was done. Go take pictures, too, try things out. Try out things you don't think will please you. You don't think you'll ever use flash? Go take some anyways, that work will inform your landscapes, I promise. Shoot black and white, shoot color. Shoot portraits and street. Copy things you've seen. Fool around in your photo editor, trying to re-create effects you've seen, whether you like them or not. Read up on effects, how they were done in the darkroom and how they are done today.

There are degrees of knowledge here. You can recognize a visual effect when you see it, as you might recognize staccato. You might have some passing familiarity with how to produce an effect, or an idiom. You might feel extremely comfortable with some element of the photographic vocabulary. There is some value in each. Even a passing awareness of a photographic idea might inform an inspired moment, you might say "Oh man, THAT look, THAT would be PERFECT!" without having the foggiest notion of how to produce that look. I theorize, though, that your unconscious processes are more likely to seize upon just the right thing the more thoroughly you understand it. The inspiration machine that searches for solutions while you shower is, it seems reasonable, more likely to seize upon solutions you can execute than upon solutions you cannot.

A long, long time ago I wrote about the Second Worst Advice which is to just go out and shoot. That makes about as much sense as sitting down at the piano and poking notes at random. Go out and shoot, by all means, but with a plan. Today, I will work on phrasing. Today, I will work on black and white pictures of people. Today I will write a sonnet, however awful. Today I will take a still life backlit with flash. Today I will expand my vocabulary thus.

Vocabulary is the fuel of inspiration.

Making the Pictures I Want

This is a followup to the previous, a little discussion of my personal journey, which might shed a little light on what I mean in the previous essay. I'm linking, in here, to quite a few pictures I have shot. Enjoy. Or not.
I've been mucking around with cameras for.. a while. I literally cannot remember when exposure was a puzzlement, it would have been 30 years ago or so, and I suppose I had to struggle with it a bit, but I have no memory of that. The technicalities of making a properly exposed and in-focus picture hold no mysteries for me. I flatter myself that I have long been able to take a decent picture of a thing. A picturesque picture of a shack or a mountain, a moderately flattering picture of a girl, and so on.

About three years ago I embarked on one of those stupid P52 things. I tried to take a decent picture every week for a year, and mostly succeeded. The result was an incoherent mass of mostly decent pictures. I learned a few things, started to get more serious about using flash, and discovered a couple of "looks" I sort of liked.

Somewhere in there I started shooting nudes, experimenting with outré lighting idioms and so on. I learned a few more things about looks that I liked. Those pictures are extremely private. Sorry.

The year following my interesting but uninspiring P52 project I made several abortive attempts at portfolios. I was beginning to understand that the portfolio is really what I wanted to be aiming at. I started shooting people walking dogs, which I think is definitely a good subject. I discovered that I am not, or at any rate was not, the artist to make much of anything of that subject. There was, and still are, occasional feints at street photography. I'm also not Henri Cartier-Bresson, it turns out. None of these subject/method based ideas really seemed to go anywhere. I was not satisfied by the work, I did not feel that it was going anywhere. It seemed banal and uninteresting after a handful of moderately successful pictures.

I don't think that, I can see no reason why, a subject based idea isn't good. I just haven't been able to make one work yet to my satisfaction. I did recently shoot a subject-based mini-portfolio which pleases me moderately well, but this is mainly because I approve of the content so much. The pictures are OK, but the meaning is something that matters to me.

What has worked best for me started with a single visual effect. I ran across a description of how to digitally simulate an enlarger diffusion effect. This effectively "flares" the darker areas into the lighter ones, to a variable degree. It's absolutely dead sexy when applied to nudes, especially female nudes. Holy cow. Yum. Probably at random I applied it to a picture of a flower. Boy oh boy did I like that effect.

At this point I started to shoot flowers in the way I had been shooting nudes. Mostly quite dark. A lot of snoots, a lot of lighting from underneath or behind. Always, enlarger diffusion to taste. A little later, I started to apply the inverse of enlarger diffusion to high-key pictures, and finally I started to airbrush all over everything in a late pictorialist fashion, although possibly with a lighter touch. I shot a lot of these things, and wound up with a coherent portfolio of 27 pictures that I quite like. I am satisfied with them.

What worked for me, here, was to start with a single visual motif: the flower, shot like a fine art nude on black. I inverted the ideas, I modified them, I extended the theme out from there in coherent and sensible ways. With some fits and starts, Quite a lot of things didn't work, but some things did. The result is a coherent set of visual motifs, applied to a common subject. The result is a little portfolio of work that "means" something for me, that satisfies me in a way that previous work has not.

Notice that this portfolio was built with a bunch of stuff I had picked up over the previous years: use of flash, outré lighting idioms, general styling from nudes, enlarger diffusion. It is very reasonable to view this satisfying work as the direct result of a bunch of less satisfying labor. It is reasonable to view this as a successful effort which occurred in the natural process of trying ideas out, and building visual vocabulary, in a series of fits and starts which eventually found a path through to some satisfying place after failing for several years of concerted effort.

As of this writing, I am continuing to pursue these ideas. Can these visual motifs be applied and extended to other subjects, in a similarly coherent way? Can I make something else look like my flowers? Obviously I could shoot some nudes in this style, and that might make a good addition to the portfolio. There might be something to be said about the relationship between flowers and nudes, perhaps. Perhaps there are other subjects out there that are less obvious, but which would extend the body of work further, but in a coherent and structured way.

The point of the process I sketch here and in the previous essay is not that it always works, or that it works easily or quickly. The point is simply that this is the only process that I have been able to discover that works at all.

Making the Pictures You Want

Here is a common theme, a common refrain, a common complaint: How can I make pictures that I like? Everything I shoot is banal, or stupid, or a copy of something else. Nothing I shoot satisfies me, it all sucks, is sterile, is empty. What can I do?

For the purposes of this essay, the word meaning will be used in a pretty specific way. Meaning is simply the overall emotional and intellectual experience of a piece of art. It's everything that's not technical. It doesn't have to be expressible as a neat paragraph of text "this picture expresses man's inhumanity to man" nor need it be renderable in words at all. Sometimes it's just emotion, sometimes it is words, sometimes it's a lesson. It can be anything, really, outside of the technical details of the work. It's what I, as a viewer, experience when I look at the piece, whatever that reaction is.

Of course, this essay is ultimately about my process. It works for me, after a fashion, laboriously and slowly.

For our purposes, we will simplify the lament of the frustrated photographer to be: How can I make pictures with meaning, meaning that satisfies me. There might be a side order of dissatisfaction with visual ideas, or with design ideas. We will assume that there are basically no technical issues, however. This isn't about how to focus your camera.

There is here a pretty strong parallel with music, especially classical music. Lots of people are happy just being able to play music as notated. I certainly would be delighted to be able to play more than simple pieces, as notated. However, the problem of playing the notation is essentially pretty simple. You just take the time, you learn how to do it. It is somewhat analogous to learning how to use a camera, although quite a bit more difficult. The person who aspires to play christmas carols as notated is perhaps roughly equivalent to the person who wants to take nice pictures of her children, or wants to make passable imitations of Ansel Adams photographs.

Most of what music school is about, though, is not about playing the piece as notated. It is about how to interpret the piece in a meaningful way, within the notation given. It turns out that even a tightly notated piece of music allows a remarkably wide range of interpretation. Melodic lines can be brought forward or suppressed. Small crescendos and diminuendos can be inserted (indeed, must be, to avoid a ridiculously flat and tedious reading) at will. Timing can be altered subtly, within passages, and overall. The notes within a single chord, or a progression of them can be weighted subtly differently, for various purposes.

The problems to be solved here are: How can I play this music so that it sounds like me, how can I play this music in a way that pleases me, and how can I play this music to express my concept of how the piece should feel, should be experienced, what the piece should "mean" in the sense given above.

This is essentially the same problem that the stymied photographer faces, but I am not aware of any dedicated institution of learning devoted to teaching you how to solve the photographic analog of these problems. Music conservatories, on the other hand, are almost completely devoted to this.

There are really two major starting points.

In the first, you have a pretty clear idea of something you want to express, the problem is how to express it. You want to express, say, how the dot-com technologists are ruining the San Francisco Bay Area, or you want to express the way you feel when you look at Half Dome. This is essentially a pre-visualization problem, and I have written my thoughts about that at some length here, and in a couple of follow-on essays.

The second potential starting point is that you have no idea of what it is you want to express, you wish only to express something. You find your pictures banal, uninteresting, devoid of meaning, and you want to fix that. In this case, I employ this rough analogy: the world, the stuff in front of the camera, is a score. You're seeking to find an interpretation of it with meaning, which satisfies. This isn't the same as Adams' tired saw about the negative being the score and the print the performance, although there are similarities.

The general procedure is something like this, more or less by necessity. Pursue what ideas you have. Do you like a certain subject? Do you like a certain visual effect in your editing software, or at the enlarger? What ideas appeal to you, be they visual ideas, ideas about content, ideas about where you like to visit, anything? Pursue those. This part is obvious, since there really isn't anything else to do, is there? This is what you've got, so go work it. Push it quite far, keep pounding on these individual ideas, no matter how small or superficial. Your goal is ultimately to force, to nurture, to induce, meaning to emerge.

Keep an eye on the bigger picture. Is something bigger, something more satisfying, starting to coalesce? If so, keep going. If not, or if something that felt like it was coming together no longer feels as if it is, back up. Pursue some other idea, possibly just the opposite of what you were doing. Change something, anything.

This is by analogy to working an interpretation of a piece of music. You may simply like a certain melody fragment, you bring it out, articulate it clearly for a few passages. It sounds great. So you carry on through the whole sonata, bringing that melodic fragment to the fore every time it appears in the score. At some point you find that it's not working out, now the sonata sucks and is boring. Back off, try something else. Maybe the sonata is about the interplay of the fragment you like, and some other fragment that you don't like. Maybe that first passage is great, but the next passage needs to bring out a different motive -- but articulated in the same way. Maybe the key here isn't the fragment, but they way you've brought it out, articulated it.

In the same way, fiddle with the ideas you have, nurture them and invert them by turns. See what other ideas they spin off, until you have a whole set of ideas writhing about trying to assemble themselves into a plan, a structure, a bigger idea. Periodically ask yourself if there is something bigger trying to reveal itself.

Perhaps your ideas are all visual motifs, so you now have a collection of inter-related visual motifs. Is there a larger idea, a larger meaning, that could be carried by this family of visual ideas? As some point, with some luck, you'll have an inspiration of sorts. You will realize that these visual ideas, these design motifs, together with the subjects you've been shooting, are doing a little bit of a decent job of expressing something about God, or Beauty, or Sex, or Nature, or whatever. There's no reason you need to even be able to put words to the larger thing, just that you can feel its presence. Now you have a larger theme that you can pursue, and a set of tools you can use to pursue it.

What other subjects that you had not considered, could you apply these visual motifs to, to more fully express the larger thing? Or, if contrariwise the subjects have been carrying the water, what other visual motifs could you apply to the same subjects, again to more fully express the larger thing?

In this way, meaning can be teased gently out of some smaller beginnings, and can emerge into a portfolio with some weight. More importantly, it can emerge into a portfolio that you like, that satisfies.

If you just wanted a single picture that you like, a single picture that satisfies you, now go back to the portfolio and find the picture that best expresses the thing you like. If you can't find a single such picture, well, you just spent days or weeks or months or years making a portfolio of work. You should have the tools and ideas necessary to go and make that single picture that says what you have found you want to say.

Go make that picture.

Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.

Saving a Bad Picture

For most of us, most of the pictures we take are failures. This is normal. Sometimes, for whatever reason, we conceive a passionate desire to salvage some failed picture. Perhaps the picture is a unique picture of a unique event, or a location not to be soon re-visited. Perhaps we desire the salvage for reasons of mere whimsy.

First: Don't. Reshoot it or toss it. Second: If you must try, don't just apply a cheap effect and hope for the best. Don't tonemap it, apply a vignette, and hope that nobody will notice. Don't just turn the sharpen knob all the way to 11. The picture is bad, you are not going to make it be good.

No. You must re-imagine the bad picture as a new picture, one that is good. If you are successful, the new picture will be a different picture, it will not be the bad one repaired. By this time you have already tried and failed to fix the bad picture, it is unfixable. It is gone. There may rise from the ashes a new picture which is good, however.

First you should get straight in your own mind what is wrong with the bad picture. Since it failed, it does not meet your vision in some way or another. It might be as simple as a technical flaw, the focus is off, it's under-exposed or over-exposed. Possibly it's a more abstract problem. Regardless, get as clearly as possible in mind why this picture isn't a good one.

Next clarify in your mind what must be preserved. Is there a person or object in the picture that must be salvaged? Is there simply an idea that must be saved? Or perhaps nothing at all?

Since the flaws are un-fixable, you have two choices: embrace them, or render them irrelevant. If the picture is out of focus, imagine it as a soft picture. If it is intolerably underexposed, imagine it as a murky piece or a surreal piece. If the colors are un-fixably bad, imagine it as black and white, or as another surreal idea. Can you crop away the problem while preserving that which must be preserved? Experiment. Add grain to an intolerably noisy picture, experiment with radical adjustments and crops, see what the results look like.

Spend some time looking at other people's pictures, keep the results of your experiments in mind. Try to find pictures to look at that bear some resemblance to your experiments. Gather up other people's ideas and let them slosh around in your mind with your bad picture and the experiments and your mental list of what's wrong and what must be saved. Let the whole gestalt ferment a while. Let go of your original conception of the picture, as best you can.

You're trying to pre-visualize in the manner of Ansel Adams and his acolytes, but not a scene, instead a picture you have already made.

At some point, perhaps some re-imagining will occur to you. Count yourself and your picture lucky, go forth, and make that re-imagining. Quite likely, no such re-imagining will occur to you, or no such re-imagining will be successful. Now, having done your best, you may consign the picture to the dustbin.

Inspiration. Who needs it?!

Almost nobody needs inspiration, it turns out.

Do you want to make a picture of a pretty thing, or an interesting thing? Point the camera at it, and press the button. If you want your picture to be specially appealing, apply some technical know-how, apply some rules of thumb, and pick a gimmick or two out of the gimmick bag. You're pretty much there. Do it competently, and it'll look just like the pictures in the calendars. Arrange to have extraordinarily pretty things in front of the camera, and you might do very well indeed.

Taking pictures of babies and weddings isn't easy. It requires technical skills, problem solving skills, all around ability to do it well. What it does not require is inspiration. The pictures you need to make are all on a list. These groupings of people, these objects, these moments of the day. You might need non-photographic inspiration to get enough light onto the bride or baby, to get the family all in frame at once, or to get a smile out of the grouchy toddler. You won't need any inspiration to imagine the images, though.

You only need inspiration when the desired image is not obvious. It's not a list, it's not a copy of some other image, and it's not a copy of whatever's in front of you. It's something else.

A wedding photographer might look for inspiration, to find that one image that captures the essence of this wedding as it is distinct from all other weddings, as it is unique in and of itself, and special to the people in it.

A landscape photographer might look for inspiration to find that image which looks nothing like the scene in view, and yet somehow exactly like it, but distilled to an essence, a feeling.

My suspicion is that many photographers, even many excellent photographers, don't know that this is even a possibility. Many photographers like cameras more than they like pictures, and many photographers like pictures that pretty much look like the thing they are a picture of. Their highest ambition is to make a picture that really really looks like the thing that was in front of the camera. There's nothing particularly wrong with that. The stuff in front of the camera can be pretty amazing.

Do you look at Ansel Adams' picture of El Capitan and think "Wow, that is one spectacular rock!" or do you think "El Capitan looks nothing like that, and yet also exactly like that?"

Inspiration Thought Experiments

I'm going to sketch a couple examples of how inspiration might shape a couple of photographs. This is a follow-on to this post.

Let us suppose that you have a flower, and you want to take a picture of it. How would develop a really good pre-visualization? First you might consciously trundle through some visual ideas. Black and white picture, flower on a white background. Color picture, flower on a black background. Flower in a vase. Flower in my hand. And so on. If you come up with a visual idea that works for you, congratulations, you are done. You might refine the idea mentally, as well as in the studio, but there you are.

What if nothing satisfies?

Notice that you have been going through ideas one after the other. You examine one idea, and discard it or modify it into a new idea. You're going through ideas one by one, at a not very brisk pace. If, after you arrive at an impasse, you relax a bit, a very interesting and powerful cognitive process may occur.

Take a walk, or a shower, or a nap. Evidence suggests that your unconscious mind will continue trying out ideas, but in parallel, many ideas at once bouncing around, banging into one another, combining and recombining. Your mind will pull up an image of the Virgin Mary you saw as a child and bounce that against the image of Mount Doom from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and a thousand other possibilities.

Your unconscious mind can sift a much wider range of visual ideas, much more quickly, than your conscious mind can.

If you're lucky, a mental image will emerge, startling and clear, from this dozy chaos, this largely unconscious swirl of ideas and possibilities.

The recognition process is neurologically fascinating, I gather, but I'm not very interested in that. It does seem clear to me that in order to recognize the answer, you must prime those parts of the brain that will say Eureka! You must have consciously thought about the problem with some intensity. Some general notion of what you're after has to be clear, possibly at a very high level. Clean and simple. Dark and moody. Chaotic. Tense.

With the brain's targeting system primed, and a pile of visual material for your unconscious mind to gnaw on, inspiration can strike.

Another example, at the opposite end of some sort of spectrum:

Shooting "street" and shooting portraits have some similar properties. The general idea of what you want exists before you start, but here the moment of inspiration has to occur in real-time. You can produce pretty good portraits, and mediocre street, by conscious thought. For very good work in both areas inspiration is necessary, there's simply no time to consciously think your way through the possibilities and find a truly great image by sheer mental effort. You might find one by accident, but not through effort.

Your mind needs to be in that relaxed state, cutting and trying visual ideas out of sight of the conscious mind (or largely so, at any rate). Through some incompletely understood alchemy, the real world and the unconscious mind will, on rare but happy occasions, converge in an instant and the image will appear in your mind and in the world at the same moment. Click. There must be some process here by which the mental machinery which tests ideas is informed by the observed world. Cartier-Bresson's writing is, at any rate, consistent with this idea. Observing is done intently, pre-visualization is done instinctively.

The intense observation feeds into the unconscious image-tester, driving that engine. The conscious mind oversees, looking for higher level things, looking for ideas and personality in the visual field. Sometimes, inspiration strikes, the image is recognized in an instant, the idea crystallizes, and the shutter snaps.

Whence Inspiration?

Ansel Adams and his acolytes, who are legion, are big proponents of a thing called pre-visualization. This is a process by which you imagine, in detail, the final print of an image before you shoot it. The Zone System is, essentially, an extremely finicky and laborious mechanism for translating a sufficiently detailed pre-visualization into a final print. This is all well and good, but there seems to be very little out there on how to get that pre-visualization in the first place.

How on earth shall I visualize a photograph I wish to make?

Previous exercises given here can help you practice the mechanics, if you will, of visualization. What are the features of a photograph one can visualize? Contrast, saturation, placement of objects within the frame, and on and on. This still does not address the problem of what to visualize. What shall we stick into our blank mental frame?

Let's take a little tour of some photographers, and imagine how they might have gone about making their pictures, how their inspiration might have arisen.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Claims to have worked largely by instinct, seeing the image and pressing the shutter all in an instant. Certainly he seems to have been largely uninterested in post-processing and printing. He worked largely with a single printer, who no doubt brought a vision to the printing work. Cartier-Bresson's visualization was surely informed by this knowledge of how the final print would look. In any case. for his street photography, he seems to have simply placed a frame around objects in his field of view by selecting a viewpoint, and a moment in time.

Ansel Adams: Of course very interested in post processing, in the sense of printing in a dramatic and stylized fashion. At any given time, he surely had a specific style of printing that informed his way of looking at the world. His method was perhaps to look at an object in nature, and to see how it might look now, or at a future time, in one of his prints. One imagines that his inspirations took the form of "nice tree, but if the sun was right there and there was a bit of snow on the ground, it would be perfect. I should come back in January, about 3pm." He wrote things that suggest that this is in fact just how he worked, at least some of the time.

Andreas Gursky: All about the post-processing now. One imagines that he sees a scene, and imagines what it would be like with this removed, and that placed into the frame, and the light so, and the clouds so, and so forth. He applies an intense layer of imagined photoshop on top of the sorts of things that Ansel Adams applied in terms of light, season, time, and so forth. His inspiration, perhaps, consists in looking at the Rhine, and coming to realize how it might be made to look in an enormous print, with enormous amounts of photoshop.

By chewing on this and other imagined examples, we can see that the pieces that go into an inspired image are: the objects in the field of view - what you are looking at; post-processing ideas; stylistic ideas - which combine placement of seen objects with post-processing and other photographic ideas; and probably many other inputs. This stuff is pushed around in the mind and then, either instantly, more slowly, or never, a pre-visualization appears. An idea for a picture is upon us.

These inspirations might be small, a simple treatment for a subject: I should light the flower from behind. They might be larger: I want an elephant, 400 bricks, a lights here, here, here, tint it all red, and then -- then -- I really have something. The inspiration might be developed through hours of tinkering, or it might hit you in an instant that now, this instant the street scene has fallen into perfection.

Let's take a moment to see how inspiration works. Roughly speaking, this is the process:

• You begin to think about a problem of some sort. Mental resources are marshalled.
• You test solutions, imagining possibilities and trying them out, to no particular avail. Perhaps you devise solutions, but they are unsatisfactory.
• You relax and let your mind wander a bit.
• This in turn causes a wider net of mental associations to be unconsciously cast. More ideas and resources are marshalled, but you are not aware of them.
• The mind generates a solution, pulling together a really good set of associations which neatly solves the problem.
• You, in your conscious mind, recognize this solution as such. (this, it turns out, is a really interesting step)
• You shout Eureka! and leap out of your bath.

How can you help this along? You need some resources to marshall, in the first place. You need more resources that are further out there, to be scooped up and examined by the unconscious parts of the process. Then you need a problem, and proper management of your mental states. First concentrate, then relax. Finally, you need some luck.

In order to develop an inspired photograph, therefore, you need a bunch of visual ideas. Pictures you have seen, styles you have thought about, digital effects you know about. You need a wide array of stuff: paintings, styles of art, novels you have read and songs you have heard, people you have loved. Your whole experience as a person can be involved. Make that experience rich, but make it richer in art, richer still in visual art, and richest of all in photographic art.

The problem for the photographer will generally be simple. How shall I photograph this flower? How can I make this mountain look dramatic and yet beautiful? What light would make this model look terrifying?

Now, manage your mental states. Think hard on your problem. Devise specific solutions:

I will use a hard-edged light on this model, to make her look scary. No, I will light her from below, with a hard-edged light!

Carry on until you get stuck, and find yourself mentally spinning uselessly. Carry on for a little while to give your brain momentum. Now take a break. Go for a walk, take a shower, take a nap. If your mind has been wound up enough, it will carry on with a mass of unconscious inertia, gnawing on your problem. If you are lucky, at some moment a bit later on, you will suddenly see how your should photograph the model, or the flower. The solution will appear, more or less fully formed, ideally.

Now you must translate this solution into a photograph. This is a technical problem.

How shall I produce that lighting effect? How can I make the shadows deeper and more sharply edged? How can I create a densely grainy effect?

Technical problems, being technical problems, are solved by the gigabyte load, on web pages all across the internet.

May I suggest google?