Using Color to Create Mood

I'm not sure how often the full moon shows up within frame of Mt. Baker but I was lucky to be able to preserve this moment and use this as an example for my previous assignment (A8) with Ming Thein's Email School of Photography. This assignment is about colour, tone and brightness and how it affects our mood and the way we feel about images. It boils down to psychology, how we feel at a given situation depends a lot on light; bright/white being pure and clean, dark being mysterious/dangerous, warm yellow light is homely and welcoming, blue is detached/impersonal/scientific/clean/cold, green & purple are alien. Most of these associations are due to the way we are used to observing the real world. Cinematographers use this all the time to create a certain feel for a scene. It heightens the impact of the rest of the visuals because we are predisposed to observing them in a certain way.

Using Secondary Objects to tell a Story

The subject of a photograph is what it's about but sometimes it helps to add context. Adding context in the form of secondary objects help in photographic story telling. In fact the more careful you select the contents of your frame the more precise a story you can tell and the more layering and complexity you can add to the story. Assignment 7 or what I try to label as A7 is about using secondary objects to tell a story. This is helpful to both attract attention as well as hold it because it forces your audience to pause, think and take in the details.