Colours: Colour relationships - part 1

I plan to visit several locations looking for photographs showing colour relationships. The first series of photographs were taken in my local town of Guildford.

Image 1: Orange drink cartons

Nikon 18-70mm at 70mm: Iso 400 f8 for 1/1250th second

A few hundred yards beyond the recycling box that I photographed (Image 6) in the previous post, the bright orange of these juice cartons caught my eye.

I photographed the whole box of papers and cartons, but selectively included just the orange and red/yellow cartons at this end of the box. I also chose to make the violet box occupy roughly twice the area of the orange/red cartons having regard to the relative brightness of orange relative to violet.

Comments on colours

Looking at the small area of yellow on the red and yellow carton, I can believe that yellow would have been a more harmonious combination. However, I like the way that the orange cartons stand out as a strong contrast with enhanced vibrance. The clash between saturated violet and orange seems to make the picture. There were some bright blue cartons in the box as well, and when these were included, the colour of the orange cartons appeared relatively muted.

Image 2: Telephone box outside Holy Trinity Church

Nikon 18-70mm at 35mm: Iso 125 f8 at 1/80th second

I took several photographs of the telephone box including varying amounts of the background tree. I subsequently used the cropping tool in Lightroom to view the impact of bringing the proportion of red and green tones into roughly equal proportions. This is the version that I felt was the most harmonious having regard to the irregular shape of the tree and the muted red walls in the background.

Comments on colours

The sunlight on the saturated pure red of the phone box is the dominant visual element in the frame. This is framed by the overhanging leaves of the tree in the left foreground. It is the patches of sunlight on the leaves and green areas across the top and down the left side of the photograph that balance the red of the phone box and draw the eye around the frame. There are muted red walls in the background that tone with the bright red of the phone box. The dark greens of the plants and leaves in the shadows tone in with the brighter greens of the sunlit leaves. I sometimes find bright red and green rather discordant even though they are complementary colours, but I find the dappled background light in this picture quite pleasing.

Image 3: Quadrangle of seventeenth century building

Nikon 18-70mm at 56mm: ISO 125 f8 for 1/125th second

The morning sun was lighting this corner of the quadrangle and I was attracted by the bright green colour of the plant growing up the wall set against the red brick of the wall. I framed the photograph to include some of the green lawn in the foreground so that the green and red were roughly equal in area.

I wanted the window, door and bench to be the visual focus, and I therefore cropped out a narrow band from the top of the frame to exclude some architectural features which drew attention away from these. The building is a home for people without means to support themselves which has a quiet and restful atmosphere. I felt that the composition of "squares" would convey this sense of rest.

Comments on colours

In the sunlight the bricks are quite bright, but the colour is not that saturated. The hue is predominantly a red-orange, but it is mixed in with some dark tones as well as the beige colour of the mortar between the bricks. The door has a similar tone to the bricks where it is lit by the sun. The green of the grass has a similar brightness and saturation as the bricks, but the hue is more uniform. The climbing plant is more saturated with a hues ranging from a relatively pure green to yellow green for some of the younger leaves. The harmony of the complementary colours red and green seems to accentuate the quiet atmosphere of the place.

Image 4: Window of empty shop

Nikon 18 - 70mm at 38mm: Iso 125 f8 for 1/125th second

The light blue background of this empty shop window adjoins a brown varnished pillar and brown painted shutters. The blue interior contrasted strongly with the colour of the varnish which resembles a muted dark orange. I thought that the dark blue shadow areas in the window and the horizontal lines of the brown shutters would make an interesting abstract composition (reminiscent of some of Bronwen Brightons abstracts). The contrast and exposure of the original photograph were increased in Lightroom which brought some vitality to a rather flat original.

Comments on colours

The light blue and dark blue shadows are a reasonably pure blue (without green or purple tendencies). The contrasting orange-brown colour is moderately unsaturated and darker in tone. In the original photograph, the area of the blue and brown areas were roughly equal. I reduced the orange brown area to about one third of the frame as this seemed too dominant previously. This is less than the theoretical proportion for a bright orange, but for this colour it looked OK to me.

I selected this subject as one of complementary colours, and colour checker in Photoshop elements confirms that the colours are roughly opposite on the colour wheel (185 degrees apart). However, I do not find the colours particularly harmonious, which maybe due to the difference in brightness.

Image 5: Run-down buildings

Nikon 18-70mm at 70mm: Iso 125 f8 at 1/400th second

I was attracted by the saturated colours on these adjacent buildings in a street which is due to be redeveloped and hence the buildings are fairly run down. Each building has its own textures and colours and I thought that the weeds growing on both structures provide visual interest.

The original photograph placed the junction of the two buildings centrally and it included a larger area of sky. I cropped out most of the sky, as this detracted from the two blocks of colour. I also cropped the right hand edge of the original picture to move the vertical white strip away from the central line of the frame (although I wanted to keep the colour blocks roughly equal in size as the tones seemed evenly matched).

Comments on colours

The building on the left has been painted a highly saturated and moderately dark orange-red colour. The board on the front of the adjacent building has been painted a highly saturated and moderately dark greenish-blue colour. I suspected that these hues were roughly complimentary and I confirmed this using the Photoshop Elements colour checker which suggested that the colours are 170 degrees apart on the colour wheel.

The coloured blocks in this case appear to me to be quite harmonious but the similarity of saturation and tone almost certainly contribute to this harmony.

Image 6: Discordant colours

Nikon 18-70mm at 70mm: Iso 125 f8 for 1/160th second

The frontage of the next shop was painted in this saturated bright orange red colour. I found the blue green to bright red contrast quite discordant, but I quite liked the photograph including the yellow coloured sign. I tried cropping the photograph in various ways before I arrived at this, my preferred version. The yellow sign adds a necessary third element into the composition as well as being quite harmonious with the orange red colour. For a viewer, I would expect that the abstract subject lacks interest, which the gaudy colours do not make up for. I nevertheless thought it was worth including this in the blog as a study of colours. This is different to the other colour combinations I have photographed.

Comments on colours

The blue-green painted tiles on the left side are less dark than the same colour in the previous image (this is the lower part of the same building). The orange red colour is also highly saturated and side by side, the two colours almost vibrate. I was quite surprised when I used colour checker to compare the hues more precisely. The orange-red hue on the right side is almost at the same place on the Photoshop colour circle as the darker orange-red in image 5. However the separation between the two colours is closer to 160 degrees than 170 degrees.

The yellow sign is a similarly highly saturated and bright colour. It is reasonably harmonious on the orange-red, an example maybe of harmony of similar colours. (However on the Photoshop colour wheel the yellow hue is just over 40 degrees separated from the orange red.)

Conclusion

Several of the subjects that I photographed are man-made painted surfaces, which are likely to be of limited visual interest. I nevertheless considered that it has been a useful exercise to use these as examples of complementary or contrasting colours even though the colours are bright and obvious.