POV: The Usefulness of Mood Boards

Photo © Steven Hom Photography | All Rights Reserved

Before embarking on producing ethnic fashion photo stories and photo-films, I had never heard of the term 'mood board' and no knowledge of what it was for. It was on my third or fourth photo shoot in Kuala Lumpur in 2018 that I was told what it was and how useful it could be. 

Since I go beyond the norms of a regular fashion shoot with my photo film stories (like this one) by merging photographs and audio, I have to begin with a concept, and research a story line based on the life of a legendary actress, a historical or imaginary event such as the 1930s in Shanghai, or a fantasy story. 

Once the story line is chosen, I can move to the next step of creating a story board that helps me arrange the sequence of poses, the wide angle shots and close-ups, and the facial expressions of the model who will help me in the project. To help in that, I dig in various sources for images to gather as many as possible to guide me in how to set up the poses, and what to ask the model to imitate. 

So this is where and when the mood board kicks in. The mood board is a collection of images (usually not your own) that helps to visually communicate the direction of the shoot. 

Photo © Jimmy Lee Lee | All Rights Reserved

I also found a mood board also incredibly useful when conferring with the models/friends before starting the photo sessions. In the case of the audio photo stories, I usually sent them the script(s) for the short story(ies) and a selection of the images I liked from the mood board ahead of my arrival to the country or city where we would work. This allowed them to train for the voiceover and narration, as well as the poses I anticipated asking of them.

The mood board's help is also invaluable when there are language difficulties between me as the photographer and the model(s) and stylists (if any). In some cases, I just pointed at a particular image whose pose I liked, and it was done.

The sources for my mood board were/are mainly from Pinterest, and a few from Twitter. Since these images are only for inspirational and guidance purposes, I'm not infringing on any rights.

A Small Sample of my Mood Board