I believe that this originates from Ansel Adams who said:

“In my mind’s eye, I visualize how a particular… sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.”

I get that. That’s pretty much what I try to do with my photography. When I see something that interests me, I have a sense of how the final photograph should look. In effect, I visualize how the final image will look and do all I can to get it to look the way I visualized it.

What I don’t get is where the “pre” comes from. The prefix “pre” means something that comes before something else e.g. “The tree was almost certainly planted pre-1700.” or “She attended a pre-adolescent dance class.”

So “pre-visualize” would suggest something that you do before you “visualize”. What is that? Am I missing something?

I quickly browsed around the internet and couldn’t find a quotation where Adams uses “pre-visualize”, although I did find examples (such as the one above) where he does use “visualize”.

Admittedly, I didn’t spend much time looking so I might well have missed something. It was just a passing thought that I don’t really want to spend more effort on.