Adding Mood to an Image

When you look on the internet you see images everywhere. There are millions and millions of them. They are all great and that then creates the problem of how to make yours stand out. I don’t know the answer to that, or what you can do about it, but what I love to do is try adding mood to my images.

This is an old Church in the small country town of Woomelang. I go up there a lot and I first started taking photos of this Church about 20 years ago, and the last time I did was back in August. When I was there last, a few weeks ago, this Church was gone. The building had been sold and it was taken apart to be shipped somewhere else. Now there is one less thing to take photos of up there.

This photo was actually taken early in 2014. I wanted to do something more with one image to show it in a new light and as a thank you to it for being a fantastic subject all these years. It is my farewell to the building.

The original image had a horrible sky. It was taken very early in the morning and to say it was boring is an understatement. The first thing I had to do was replace it. I found a sky that I had taken up there once before. It was also done in early morning, so perfect really.

Cloudy skies are great for adding mood to an image. It is so important, I think, for fine art photographers to collect certain things, and one of those is skies. I have collected around 300 different ones so far, and I continue to collect them.

This image would not have had the same impact if the sky was boring. We know that clouds give us a feeling of morose or something like that. There is something about cloudy days that effects us all. When you see images with that cloudy sky then those feelings come to you. I like the way it helps to demand a response from the viewer.

Just because you take an image under certain circumstances, doesn’t mean you have to settle for it.  You can change whatever you like in the image to get what you want. Of course you have to know how, and if you don’t there is nothing to stop you from learning.

Think about what you wish you could do with your images.