Colour: Primary and secondary colours - part 1

Fruit were the first subject that I chose for this exercise as it is not difficult at this season of the year to find strong yellow, orange, green and red colours.

Rather than take a straightforward record of the fruit, I had the idea of imitating Saturn's shape, by placing a small fruit inside a larger one, with both fruit having a similar hue. For example, a green lime could be placed in the centre of a melon with light green flesh. I thought it might be interesting to see the effect of having a more saturated and a less saturated colour in the photograph.

I used shaded daylight with a neutral background in our living room. I set up the fruit on a stand (ironing board) about ten feet away from the patio doors and placed my camera on a tripod to one side so that the subject was lit from the side and the background was the plain wall behind.

I needed to use my 70-210 mm lens at full zoom so that the fruit filled most of the frame. I usually find that an aperture of f16 will ensure that most of the subject is sharp. However, in this case, the edges of the surrounding fruit were still blurred so I decreased the aperture to f32.

The light levels in the room were low, especially as the weather was cloudy and the exposure times ranged from 3 to 15 seconds. It was not until I viewed the photographs on my computer screen that I realized the effect of the low levels of light:-

• There was a considerable variation in the colour of the background, some photos with a strong yellow cast, others with a blue or green cast. I was shooting RAW files so I adjusted these back to neutral using Lightroom software.
• The colour of the fruit was very muted compared to the original colour. I felt that the colours were sufficiently OK for the purposes of this exercise except for the strawberries. I retook the photographs of the strawberries outside in brighter light (see previous post).

I took photographs applying the camera's normal exposure together with one photograph half a stop over exposed and one half a stop underexposed. I display below and describe just the one of the three photographs that I considered closest in colour to the colour wheel.

Image 1: Lime and green melon

Nikon 70-210 mm at 210mm. Iso 160 f32 for 9 seconds

This is the photograph exposed half a stop over the camera suggested exposure. This is closest in brightness in the lit area to the pure green in the colour circle. The colour is still slightly dark. The skin of the lime is an intense green but it seems to have a slight yellowy tinge.

Image 2: Orange and Ogen melon

Nikon 70-210 mm at 210mm. Iso 400 f32 for 9 seconds

In this case, I chose the photograph at the exposure setting suggested by the camera.

This seemed to represent the purest colour of the three exposure settings. Again the colour of the skin of the orange in the non-highlighted areas is highly saturated. The hue appears to be fairly close to the printed colour circle tone.

Image 3: Lemon and pineapple

Nikon 70-210 mm at 145mm. Iso 400 f32 for 5 seconds

I chose the photograph exposed half a stop over the camera suggested setting as the closest to the reference colour. The yellow colour appears to be reasonably close to a pure hue, without tending to either green or orange. Except for the highlight area, it is also reasonably saturated.

Image 4: Strawberries

Nikon 70-210mm at 210mm: Iso 400 f32 for 1/10th second

Unlike the above photographs, this was taken outside in natural daylight (as described in the previous post). Because of the size and shape of the strawberries, it was not readily possible to adopt a "saturns rings" set up so I simply aimed to fill the frame with red as much as possible. The strawberries are close to a mid red and their colour is very saturated.