7 Ways to Capture Emotions in Your Photography.

“When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track.” (Weegee)

The ability to convey emotion makes a good photograph. The ability to express your own feelings and emotions with the help of your camera makes a good photograph. The ability to express emotions and to evoke them makes a great photograph.

There are 7 tips to capture emotions in your photography.


1. Realize what you feel.
Your photo should be your expression of what you feel and what you see through the viewfinder. Your emotional state could influence strongly on the emotional quality of your photos. If the scene you are watching makes you anxious, then be anxious and capture anxiety.
If you were bored taking your photos, don’t expect your viewers be excited by them. Share your own joy or sadness, empathy or anger through your photography.

2. Look up at an unexpected moment.
Very often photographers say “cheese” or “smile” to force people to give one constant expression of “happiness” or “joy”. But the result with unnatural facial expressions is not so interesting.

3. Capture the mood of your subject.
If a model you’re photographing is in a pensive state, capture that. If she/he is annoyed or displeased, capture that.

4. Focus on faces.

 “Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face—the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited; and the wealth and confusion that man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.” (Edward Steichen)

Let me remind you the well-known quote by great Shakespeare: “The Eyes are the window to your soul”. Emotions are conveyed by the facial expressions, by the eyes clearly.

5. Don’t limit yourself.
Don’t limit yourself by capturing faces; instead experiment with a full range of emotional interpretations. Sometimes the gestures made by hands, or the posture of a spine could tell you more than a face.

6. Shoot after the “moment”.
Very interesting images could be taken right after the shot that your models were expecting. This is when they are feeling more natural and relaxed.

7. Fill your photographs with feelings, energy, mystique aura…
(read more here and here)

Photography is all about capturing emotions, mood, authenticity, movement. Your photography is able to draw a viewer into the image, to stay there for a bit, and to be happy or sad for a moment…


Thank you for reading! Feel free to comment!

• Share on Google+