how mood affects an image

An image making challenge for me this month over at Inspiration Collaboration involved bubbles, specifically a painting by Helen Eaton called Blowing Bubbles.

This challenge took me in a few different directions, and was a good example of how mood can affect the outcome of an image. I'll show you two paths my creative journey took me.

First, a photograph of bubbles in my drinking glass, courtesy of club soda, got me heading for my camera.

This is a "real" photograph, with the colour amped up a bit. My clear glass was sitting on an orange placemat when I took the photo. I thought the image was interesting, but it didn't really grab my imagination.

A few days later, I was thinking about the image again. It was a terrible week in the news. Marches and protests were held all over the world. Years of systematic racism, and the filmed murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, erupted into outrage not seen in years. I am white. My whole life has been what some might call privileged. I cannot, just cannot, imagine what anyone who does not have white skin must face on a daily basis. My heart actually hurt at some of the things I saw reported on the news. How can people treat each other like this? Worse than animals? 

I was in this mindset when I tried to work with my bubble image again. I changed the image to black and white, overlaid with a gritty texture. This is the result:

The Rising

I don't make political statements, and keep my thoughts to myself. But in my mind these bubbles symbolize people. People coming together. People rising up through the darkness from oppression.

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Where will it all end? I hope for a better world. And I hope...really hope...that my hope starts to be stronger than my fears.

My emotions came out through my editing when I was working on this image. Dark and brooding, it was a good exercise in how working with art can release inner feelings.

But it was not a good match for Helen's Blowing Bubbles painting. So the next week I had another inspiration. This is my creation...another "real" photograph:

Bubble with Joy

Happy bubble...bubble over...bubbling with joy. Where do I feel like that? In my garden. No matter what's going on in my life, or in the world around me, walking through my garden brings me joy. Yellow, the colour of happiness, a flower to convey a sense of place, and bubbles to signify joy, combine to visually express how I feel in my garden.

As I said, this image wasn't created on the computer. Here's how I accomplished it:

I have a clear paperweight filled with bubbles, and I took the photos while holding the paperweight over the flowers. Sometimes creativity can come into play without a computer :)