Inspired #23

Using colour to convey emotion

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.

Ancient woodland in the mist

This week, for my last post relating to emotional landscapes, I want to go back to the image that inspired this month’s challenge. This shot of the woods in the mist was one I took for my ‘Connection’ project. I wanted to use it to convey fear, but as it stands (to me at least) it doesn’t seem very scary. I knew that if I wanted this image to convey fear I would have to change it in some way while still remaining true to the location and the original scene.

The way I chose to do this was to experiment with the colours.

Colour evokes emotion and is a powerful tool for conveying feelings within photography. As a general rule warm colours like red, orange and yellow have an energy about them and can convey feelings of happiness, joy and excitement. Whereas cool colours like blue and green are more restful and often convey peace, tranquility or even sadness. Black is often seen as mysterious or cold and is most associated with sadness.

In this post I am going to look at some of my images and discuss how I have used colour to evoke certain moods. I also thought it would be fun to try an image response experiment in the chat - akin to photographic Chinese whispers - and see how we all respond to emotion in images.