Photo challenge: photographing emotions

This challenge was inspired by the Picasso quote:

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun”

Yesterday I talked about the importance of sharing and showing your work. It gives your work a new dimension when other people engage with it. And I love to know that I am creating photos that make a connection with my viewer. I don’t want my photos to just be glanced at, then forgotten.

If you want your photos to be meaningful for people then – what becomes such an essential part of photography then – or any act of creating, painting, music – is imbuing your photos with feeling. Even if you have everything else perfect – great composition, beautiful light, perfect exposure, there will be *something missing* if the photo isn’t imbued with feeling. It will be looked at and forgotten.

And this starts with you. As Don McCullin says:

Or you could think about it this way. You always notice things more when they come into your life – so when your wife is pregnant there seem to be pregnant women everywhere. Or your friend buys a yellow car, and then as if from nowhere, yellow cars appear everywhere. (This isn’t a trick, it’s just the fact that your mind blocks out most things in the outside world because there is too much stimuli, it’s too tiring to go around noticing everything, so your brain helpfully blocks most information.)

Now the obvious way to communicate feeling is through human beings. But I don’t want you to photograph people’s faces. I want you to seek out that emotion and capture it in the world around you – in everything but faces.

I want you to look for the feelings that you experience when looking at light, the ocean, a puddle on a rainy day – or a door, a set of deck chairs, a pavement filled with children’s chalk drawings.

Depression..?

There are so many emotions to choose from, how lucky! How about sadness? Joy? Love? Fear? Excitement? Anticipation? Disgust? Here are some popular emotions – but don’t confine yourself to just these. Play around and find something you are really interested in.

Last rule – you can use people figuratively – but not as the main subject.

*Tip: it really helps if you are in the mood that you are trying to capture. It’s like your feelings flow out of you and into the camera. But it is still possible to recreate that feeling if you are mindful enough.

Here are some examples from me of emotions and feelings I’ve created in my images.

The chilly feeling of foreboding….

Delight

Loneliness…

Joy!

Hmm…what’s the feeling here? I think the yellows and the greys communicate something quite distinctly….

Advertisers are always trying to communicate feelings with their images, so they must be powerful 🙂

And I would love to see what you come up with. Let me know what you think, and post your photos, in the comments below.

Have an awesome week,

Anthony and Diana