Inspired #14

Using colour to create mood

Hello and welcome to Inspired, a weekly email for my paid subscribers. In this series I want to explore topics which I hope might spark some inspiration for your own photography. I will talk about my thought process for creating images, both in the field and in post processing. The posts will be linked in some way to the monthly challenges, hopefully giving you all lots of food for thought.

This week I am going to talk about creating mood in an image by working with colour. There are different ways we an do this in the field and in post processing and I will look at both in this post.

Colours play a big part in how we relate to an image. Warm colours have an energy about them and can make us feel joy and love, excitement or even danger if we are thinking of more fiery red hues. Cool colours tend to make us feel calm and lend themselves to more tranquil images. When we are out in the field we don’t necessary have control over what colours are present in the landscape, but we can control how they appear in our images and we can also control how we represent them in post processing.

In this post I am going to discuss a series of images and talk about my creative choices based on the use of colour.