Creative: Think About Mood, Think About Feel

I don’t care how many images you make or how many pages you design. My goal is to urge you to create something with a mood or feel. I want you to avoid the idea that you need to create something “perfect,” whatever that means—images or books. I want to apply this advice to my workshop students who are always under pressure to produce. But let me first tell you why I’m writing this post. Someone sent me a link to the Instagram page of a European photographer collective. The collective was landscape/nature-based. Up popped a perfect wall of color. Perfect. Sunsets through clouds, dripping rainforest branches, and incredible oceanic activity. There were paddlers and hikers and riders, all in perfect conditions. I love nature. I love the outdoors. I love physical activities. This site should have been PERFECT for me.

And yet I felt nothing at all.

And when I say “nothing,” I mean I felt lesser as a person for watching what was before me. That might sound strange, but the page left me feeling hollow. The imagery was perhaps the best example of “content” I’d ever seen. The kind of thing we see all day, every day. The kind of stuff that brands lap up. Safe, perfected, expected, and void of model releases. The kind of thing that will soon be consumed by artificial intelligence.

The work had no feel or mood. It felt flat and plastic. After giving the page a second chance, I realized I had never seen ANYTHING in nature that resembled what I’d seen on the page. I’d never seen a purple that purple. I’d never seen a paddler doing what they were doing in those images. I’d never seen a sunset crafted and polished the way it appeared online, nor had I seen the sun as large as it was represented. Simply put, too good to be true.

Now, I want you to think back. I want you to think back to past images you have encountered in your lifetime. Those odd moments captured by anyone, not necessarily a professional photographer. My mind goes to a 3×5 print I found in a box of images my mother made while visiting friends in the Caribbean. The images were what you would expect. Random, questionable exposures, odd cropping, and composition. All but one, and the one stopped me in my tracks. The image was a portrait of sorts, the subject off-center to the left, with a nice falloff. The light was coming from the right, and the subject was focused on a book they were holding in their hands. The background was a classic Caribbean cottage. Light blue and covered in island ephemera. I couldn’t stop looking. The picture had such an impact, it felt like it was the ONLY image I needed to know what her trip was like. Was this a picture that would have won a contest? Garnered massive views or likes? No. But it had feel.

During my time in the newspaper world, I ran into all kinds of photographers. Some generalists could conquer nearly any subject matter. Others were spot news junkies, sports junkies, and a few who could pull off a top-level fashion shoot. Some gearheads had all the latest gadgets, and others were still using tech from the 1980s. There were plenty of photographers who could produce what they needed to produce, even at an extremely high level, but their work didn’t always have feel. And then there were a few oddballs who made pictures that floored the rest of us. They might not have made as many images as some of the more polished snappers, but what they produced made you swallow hard and realize you weren’t as good as you thought. With these folks, feel and mood were essential elements.

Maybe what I’m after is the snapshot. Images around the periphery of what we think we are after. Images made when our guard is down. Images that aren’t supposed to define us. Images that work well with random other things, like copy, drawings, and explanations. Off stage right or left. In between moments, we dismiss at first. But something about them brings us back to reconsider, and that’s all we ask in the modern world. A moment to take a breath. A moment to ponder. What was the intention if we had no intention?

PS: I think certain cameras lend themselves to the style of image I’m talking about. Leicas and X100’s in particular. Less so with larger mirrorless systems, which work well for the commercial stuff, but aren’t small enough to lend themselves to odd moments. For those of you wondering what meaning feels like with the written word, please watch Paterson.