How Do You Turn a Mood Board Into a Photo Session?

You have a Pinterest board. A folder full of screenshots. Maybe an album cover you love, a movie that has exactly the right mood, or a photograph you've saved for three years without really knowing why. Great.

You do not need to know how to turn any of that into a photo session. That's our job.

A mood board isn't a shot list. It's a starting point. It's a way for us to understand what you're drawn to before we begin creating something of our own.

You Don't Need a Fully Formed Idea

One of the biggest misconceptions about planning a portrait session is that you need to arrive knowing exactly what you want. You don't.

Sometimes a client can articulate the idea perfectly. Other times it's simply, I love the lighting in this photograph, or I want something that feels like this.

That's useful information.

We can look at the images you've collected and start identifying the common threads. Is it the wardrobe? The color? The movement? The lighting? Maybe every photograph has an unusual crop or a certain kind of attitude.

Often, the person who created the mood board hasn't even noticed those connections.

That's where collaboration begins.

Inspiration Shouldn't Become Imitation

For a recent session with our former assistant, Kade, he arrived with a Pinterest board filled with fashion imagery he loved. There were dramatic poses, unconventional styling, strong body lines and photographs that played with ideas of masculinity and femininity. He also brought clothes. Harmony brought clothes, and then things escalated.

Kade and Harmony started pulling pieces from both wardrobes, mixing them together and changing proportions. A leather vest appeared. Wide trousers. Chains. A corset.

My job wasn't to reproduce the photographs on Kade's Pinterest board. It was to understand what he responded to and translate that through my own photography.

It's important to remember to use the mood board as a vocabulary, not a shot list.

The finished photographs shouldn't look like copies of someone else's work. They should look like you.

This Is Where Collaboration Changes Everything

A good portrait session isn't necessarily photographer directs, subject obeys.

Kade requires very little direction in front of the camera. He understands movement and knows how to use his body. Harmony has an extraordinary eye for clothing and proportion. I respond to what they're doing through lighting, composition and timing.

During this session, ideas moved freely among all three of us. Nobody was terribly concerned with whose idea was whose. That's when things get interesting.

We started with references, but eventually stopped thinking about them. The session developed its own visual language.

What Should You Bring to Your Own Session?

Bring whatever helps us understand what catches your eye. That might be five Pinterest images. It might be a vintage jacket you found years ago. It could be a photograph from a magazine, the cinematography from a favorite movie, or simply a color you can't stop thinking about.

You don't have to explain why you like it, and you certainly don't need to arrive knowing how we're going to photograph it. We'll figure that part out together, because the goal isn't to recreate your inspiration. The goal is to use it to create something that becomes yours.

If you've been collecting ideas but aren't sure what to do with them, that's a perfectly good place to start.

Below are just a few images that we created with Kade:

Lucky MACK Studios | Seattle Portrait & Editorial Photography