Evoking mood
From grand landscapes to intimate details, the best landscape photographs have a power to bring us out of our conscious human experience by the sheer strength of their emotional content. Rugged coastlines and rough seas, or majestic mountains under stormy, dramatic skies can make viewers feel vulnerable and overwhelmed – it’s human nature, when we are faced with things we can’t control or that can be dangerous. Indeed, emphasizing these emotions needs to go in hand with how you frame and edit your image. The four components that can help you build emotions in your landscapes are linked to tonal contrast and colour, as well as detail and texture.
Tonal contrast and colour
Tone refers to the levels of brightness in the photograph, from solid black to pure white, and contrast refers to the difference between your darks and highlights. Evoking emotions in photographs sometimes requires manipulation of tonal contrast to achieve desired mood.
Typically, high-contrast scenes will help you express more drama, intensity and vibrancy in your landscapes, whereas low-contrast scenes are designated for more subtle and subdued landscapes – these are also the scenes that evoke a softer mood and the sense of peace.
Eliciting emotions in landscapes also means effective use of colour. Colours have emotions assigned to them that have a historical or cultural significance or have been shown to elicit a certain emotion psychologically. For example, red can symbolize anger but it can also mean passion and love. Yellow often triggers feelings of joy, happiness, and affection. Blue, in contrast, can produce feelings of sadness and aloneness, or peace, serenity and calm. Purposeful use of colour in landscape photography can bring a deeper meaning to your images and create more emotional impact.
Detail and Texture
Texture in landscapes refers to how you’d want a picture to feel if your viewer could reach out and touch the object, and therefore it is a great tool that photographers can use to evoke emotion. Typically, smooth, uniform textures provide a sense of calm, while rough, irregular textures can introduce feeling of tension and even anger. Texture in landscape photography can be used to contrast emotions as different elements of the landscape are captured together, or it can also enhance strong features of your composition.
Detail has also got a significant meaning in the art of composition, as it can extend the story and enrich the narrative with layers of emotions and
atmosphere. A lot of detail can be overwhelming and introduce a feeling of chaos, while less detail with a stronger accent on the photographed subject can evoke feelings of isolation and solitude. The interesting thing about use of detail and texture is that they can still play a role in shaping emotions, even if they aren’t a reason behind a photo’s existence.
It may be that the primary subject is a mountain on the horizon that won’t change regardless of the rest of the photo, but there’s still a big emotional difference between a smooth reflection of it in the lake versus cracked patches of dirt and rocks in the foreground.
The interesting thing about use of detail and texture is that they can still play a role in shaping emotions