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After last week’s article about blue hour photography I thought it would be interesting to explore other ways of adding a sense of mystery to your photos.
Shooting in the blue hour is one way to do that. Blue is such a luscious, mysterious color to use in your photos.
But there are other techniques you can use. Four of my favorites are shadow, fog, bokeh and blur. Let’s take a closer look at these ideas.
1. Add mystery with shadow
Television dramas and movies often use shadow to create a sense of mystery. You can use the same technique in still photography.
Shadows add mystery because they hide things.
For example, a few years ago I explored a small canyon in the south of Spain. We were there at dusk. There was nobody around. The air was still. It was a naturally beautiful, mysterious location. The rocks and grasses at the edge of the canyon made interesting silhouettes against the evening sky. Here are a couple of photos I made.
These are photos to spark the imagination. You can’t see what’s in the shadows, so your imagination takes over. That’s one way to add mystery to your photos.
You can play with this idea using photos made in bright sunlight that have dramatic shadows. Instead of opening up the shadows to reveal detail, do the opposite. Move the Shadows and Blacks sliders left to hide detail. That way you get the mystery of hidden shadows and drama from the interplay between bright sunlight and dark shade.
Exposure plays a big role in creating dramatic photos with strong shadows. The idea is to expose for the highlights by setting the exposure so that you don’t get any clipped highlights. You may lose some shadow detail, but that doesn’t matter. That’s where the mystery is.
2. Add mystery with fog
Another way to add mystery to your photos is to shoot when the light is naturally mysterious. Fog is great for this. It helps to create a list of places close to you where you could make some good photos in foggy or misty conditions. Then you can make photos like this.
3. Add mystery with bokeh
A mystery is something unknown or enigmatic (I got the synonyms from a dictionary).
What better way to add an unknown or enigmatic quality to your photos than using bokeh? The simple technique of using a wide aperture to make the background go out of focus adds a mysterious quality to your photos. It’s all about hinting at what the background contains, rather than revealing every detail (in that way it’s similar to photos made in fog).
Bokeh and shadow are similar in this respect – both stimulate the viewer’s imagination. You are deliberately leaving gaps for the viewer to fill.
This is easy to do in close-up photography, as long as you don’t have bright highlights in the background as these can quickly destroy the mood. Here are a couple of examples.
You can see that both photos have plenty of shadow as well as blurred backgrounds. The two techniques work together to add mystery to the photos.
You can apply this idea to travel photography. Experiment with the widest aperture settings on your lenses, move in close to an interesting subject and throw the background out of focus. Here are a couple of photos I made using this technique.
4. Add mystery with blur
The use of shadows and bokeh adds mystery by obscuring detail and holding something back from the viewer. Another way you can do this is through using slow shutter speeds and blur.
After I had set up the camera to take the photo below, two children walked across the beach, and climbed up on the rock. I used a long shutter speed (30 seconds) to blur the water, which also blurred the silhouetted children. I was fortunate because the figures add human interest and scale to the scene. They are a natural focal point that pulls the eye across the photo.
Once again, there are several elements working in synergy. The long shutter speed blurred the water and the children. The low end of day light is also mysterious. There are lots of shadows. All these elements add mystery and stimulate the viewer’s imagination.
I made the next photo (below) using a panning technique. I set the shutter speed to 1/3 second, stood close to the water and moved the camera as waves came up on the beach. The combination of blur and black and white made a mysterious landscape study. This is called intentional camera movement (ICM) and is a fun way to play with abstract imagery.
Conclusion
You can use the four simple techniques explored here to add mystery, mood and ambience to your photos.
As with all elements of composition bear in mind that these ideas rarely work in isolation. As you have seen they often work together to create the emotion you want to evoke in your photos.
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