Image 1 - Dinghy and lifebuoy
Nikon 18-70mm at 70mm:Iso 200 f8 for 1/320th second
This blue painted dinghy was on the quayside at Bosham next to a bright orange lifebuoy. I tried photographs from various angles, but preferred this view with the harbour in the background. This angle however reduced the size of the orange relative to the blue of the hull (and other blues in the background).
Comments on colours
The boats blue hull is complementary to the orange colour of the lifebuoy. Both the blue and the orange are reasonably pure hues and the contrast between the colours certainly makes the photograph stand out in an array of pictures.
The background colours also match the tones of the two main objects:
- The stones in the foreground are cream coloured which coordinates reasonably well with the orange lifebuoy.
- The light blue seawater and sky in the background tones in well with the blue hull of the dinghy.
These colour relationships in the image can be presented diagramatically:
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 which brought the brighter areas of each colour roughly into equivalence.
Comments on colours
The sunlight on the saturated pure red of the phone box is the initial point of attention for the viewer. The patches of sunlight on the leaves and green areas across the top and down the left side of the photograph balance the red of the phone box and draw the eye around the frame.
There are muted red walls in the background and dark greens of the plants and leaves in theshadows but these seem to have only limited impact on the overall tonal balance of the picture. Similarly the neutral grey pavement and dark coloured metal boxes on either side of the phone box have little impact on the tonal balance of the picture.
I have represented these colour relationships in the following diagram:
Image 3: Flowers on waste ground
Nikon 70-210mm at 92 mm: Iso 250 f32 at 0.7 seconds
A patch of waste ground near where we were staying in Normandy had been randomly seeded with multi-coloured flowers. I picked out this group combing one yellow and several violet flowers. This photograph was visually the strongest of this subject as the flowers formed an inverted triangle in the frame with the yellow one in the top left corner.
Comments on colours
Whilst the background green leaves and stems cover a large area of the frame, I feel that that the yellow and violet colours stand out sufficiently as the subjects of the photograph.
Yellow is complementary to violet and both are highly saturated in this photograph. Together the colours seem to envigorate each other. Alone, a photograph of either colour of flower appears relatively uninteresting.
I represented the colour relationships in a diagram:
Using this diagram, I experimented changing the background from green to a neutral grey colour. Theoretically, yellow and green are similar colours whereas violet and green are antagonistic and I wondered how the green background was influencing the relationship between yellow and violet. Changing to a neutral background seemed to change the relative prominence of the yellow and violet, but the brightness of the grey background was clearly having a major affect. I could not tell what effect of any the green background was having.
Image 4: Wheat field
Nikon 18-70mm at 18mm: Iso 200 f16 at 1/125th second
The three previous pictures used complimentary combinations of the three prime colours, blue, red and yellow in relatively high saturations. For the fourth picture I have chosen this photograph of a wheat field taken earlier this month on a sunny evening in Normandy. The colours in this photograph are less saturated, but I felt that the harmony of the complementary colours forms a significant feature of the picture.
This is one of several landscape type photographs that I took in Normandy earlier this month, inspired by the book of landscape photographs by Paul Gallagher "Curves of Grey". I wanted to mimic using a vertical frame with a subject that leads the viewers eye into the picture. Whilst the graphical elements are not as complex as many of his photographs, I liked the restful atmosphere of this scene.
Comments on colours
Whilst beforehand I would have expected a wheat field would be "cream" coloured, in fact the colour is more a light orange than a light yellow. This unsaturated orange of the ripe wheat seems to have comparable intensity to the unsaturated blue of the afternoon summer sky. There are slightly darker bands of colour at the top and bottom of the frame with the lightest colour tones on either side of the horizon. The contrast between the blue and orange colours is far weaker than in image 1 above, as the colours are far less intense. The two colours continue however to enliven each other, adding to the visual interest of the photograph.
I placed the horizon just below the centre of the frame so that the wheat colour is less than half of the area, whereas blue occupies over half of the area. As the colours of wheat and sky are relatively similar in strength, it does not seem as important to control the proportion of blue to orange as in image 1. I did not want to further reduce the area of wheat in the foreground as I wanted to keep the lead-in-lines of the tracks into the field. The end result is that the wheat field and the sky seem to have roughly equal visual interest for the viewer.
Diagrammatically, I would summarize the colour structure of the photograph as follows:-
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