Emotion first

Let me tell you about an essay my music teacher set us at the start of A level. There were four of us doing music, and the lessons happened in his study, more like an Oxbridge tutorial than a classroom. The brief: describe the perfect piece of music.

Back then I picked Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade. One of the others picked Holst’s The Planets. When we got our essays back, the master tore mine apart. Repetitive, no real musical merit, corny, he said. I argued back that it didn’t matter, because of how the piece made me feel.

Looking back I should have handed in a blank sheet with a note saying there’s no such thing as a perfect piece of music, taste is entirely subjective, and maybe he should rethink the question. I didn’t, obviously. Seventeen year olds rarely have that kind of nerve. But it stuck with me. Still does, decades later.

Subjectivity, and why photography isn’t literature

Same goes for any art. What the viewer takes from it is entirely subjective, and you have to be careful reading your own meaning into somebody else’s reaction. Literature can hide fairly obvious themes if you go looking for them. Photography’s different, I think. Whatever connection someone has with a photograph, it’s emotional first. Everything else, the composition, the technique, the references, comes after.

What my horn teacher told me

So what actually makes that emotional connection happen, and how do I try to engineer it? I keep coming back to something my horn teacher in France used to say. Your concerto is your text, he’d tell me. Your job is to recite that text to the audience, that’s all you need to think about. You’ve done the work, learned the technique, and the moment the sound leaves the bell of the instrument it isn’t yours any more. It belongs to whoever’s listening. They’re the ones who decide what it means to them.

Photography works the same way for me, portraits especially. The old advice is to focus on the eyes, because apparently that’s the door into the soul or whatever. Corny, but true enough. If I can get my model looking straight down the lens at me, and therefore at whoever’s looking at the photo afterwards, I’m most of the way to a portrait that actually lands.

On the street

Street photography’s a different game. Sometimes it’s just about catching the one detail everyone walked past without noticing, and hoping somebody sees it in the photo afterwards even though they missed it in real life. If you want the technical side of that, leading lines, rule of thirds, all of it, I’ve got tutorials on the site that go into it properly. This isn’t that post.

Colour, or the lack of it

Colour does a lot of the emotional lifting too, whether I mean it to or not. Warm tones, reds, oranges, tend to feel energetic or inviting. Cooler blues and greens slow things down, make an image feel calmer, more like you’re supposed to sit with it. I try to think about this while I’m shooting rather than fixing it afterwards in Lightroom. It’s not scientific. It’s more like deciding the mood before you’ve even framed the shot.

Black and white strips all of that out, which is exactly why I love it, on film or digital, doesn’t matter which. Without colour you’re left with texture, shadow, contrast. Somehow that can hit just as hard, sometimes harder. There’s something about a black and white image that feels outside of time to me. Nostalgic, maybe. Or just quiet.

None of this works if I’m rushing, though. Half the time the difference between a photo I keep and one I bin is whether I stepped back for a second before pressing the shutter. Sounds obvious written down. Doesn’t stop me forgetting it constantly.

I don’t have this figured out, not even close. But when I look back at that photo of Kate, my daughter, up above on Fomapan, I don’t think about aperture, or the fact I nearly missed focus. I think about how she was looking at me that day. That’s the whole thing, really. The technical stuff gets you to the moment. After that it’s just you, your camera, and whether you’re paying attention.

Next time you’re out shooting, try the thing my horn teacher told me. Do the work, get the technique out of the way, then let it go. Stop worrying about what you want the photo to say and start wondering what the person looking at it is going to feel. Worked for Glenn Miller, badly, according to my old music teacher. Might work better for you.

Also in this series: Part I — An Introduction  ·  Part II — Why Do We Photograph?  ·  Part III — The Emotions of Photography  ·  Part IV — The Art of Storytelling  ·  Part V — Identity & Self-Expression  ·  Part VI — Connection Through Photography  ·  Part VII — The Philosophy of Impermanence  ·  Conclusion