This year I’ve moved on from diptychs and I’ve been working with larger groups of images. One way to do this is a photo essay or narrative that tells a story, and I’ve been giving that a try. But when I was looking at the photographs by Mikkel Vang in a cookbook earlier this year (Bill Granger’s latest, “Bill’s Italian Food”, since you ask) I realised there was another approach: to create a mood board.

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This is a very different approach, because presenting all the images as a group means they all need to work together, but individual images are less important. For some things, like showing how something is made, or documenting a particular event, a narrative approach is the way to go. But the way we remember a walk around a city, or a weekend away, often doesn’t have that kind of structure. Instead we remember something more like a mood, and shooting pictures to combine into a mood board can capture that.

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Mikkel Vang’s pictures in the cookbook inspired me to give this a try on a recent trip to Naples. It requires a different approach to taking pictures: looking for small details and being more aware of the overall colour palette. It means taking pictures of things that you might otherwise overlook. They might not make a particularly striking image on their own, but they contribute to the overall mood.

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Mood boards, made up of other people’s images gathered from magazines or from the web, are commonly used for inspiration when planning a wedding, a household makeover or an advertising campaign. And now of course Pinterest means assembling a mood board is easier than ever. But you can also make one out of your own images. If you’re looking for a different way to see your holiday, you might want to give this a try. The recipes in Bill Granger’s book are really good, but I ended up being just as inspired by this photographic recipe!

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Kirstin