COMPOSITION - Listening to your intuition

When you happen upon a potential subject for the first time, your intuition knows what to do even if you are not aware of it. But your intuition communicates via subtle feelings and insights. As an example, let’s look at the Louise Bourgeois ‘Maman 1999’ sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao in Spain.

I was intrigued by the sculpture anyway, but as I got close to it, this thought flashed into my mind ‘... wow, that thing looks like it could attack the people or the bridge’ . It was just a flash of a thought but it became the reason for the shot. It’s that simple.
Your first thought or reaction is what you need to listen to and act on. If you take note of these little insights, no matter how odd they may appear at first, then you may get some surprising results! In this case it appeared to me like a War of the World’s scenario. So I looked at ways of bringing this thought out into the open, I had to imply a giant spider attacking a bridge. This meant that I had to get close to the spider to make it look larger than the bridge (views 1 & 2). I also thought rather than the distraction of colour, a mono treatment would illustrate this better.

View 2, colour

Actual size of the spider as reference

Spider / bridge comparison. The sculpture in front of the bridge pylon.

Your creative moment will be unique to you, and in time your intuition will become so familiar that your work will develop a unique stamp.
How you frame your subject in order to tell your story is really important. The colour view shows the relative sizes of both subjects. The spider itself was quite large, but the bridge was huge by comparison.