'Seeing' the colours wasn't too much of a problem, but finding scenes of sufficient interest and those that would provide enough of the specific colour to fit the brief did seem a bit of a treasure hunt - especially in respect of violet.
I have tried to vary the subject matter used for each colour, although my library of painted doors, window shutters, flowers and fruit & veg is expanding rapidly..
As suggested in the project brief, I've used over and under exposure in the scenes to help match the colours to the colour wheel. While this seems like a reasonable thing to do, and it does reinforce the concept learned in Exercise 1, I did find myself questioning the validity of this. After all, I'm trying to match colours against a printed colour wheel that has colours that vary in hue from other colour wheels I've seen in my research during the exercises - this part of the exercise seemed very subjective. Perhaps that's the point?
Below are the images I've selected to represent each colour, I only include the images that most closely resemble the colour wheel hue. Some images are slightly cropped - no other editing has taken place and in-camera colour enhancement features were switched off. My observations and findings follow the images in each section (I know this involves a bit of scrolling - I'm still struggling with blogger's formatting. Intuitive it ain't...)
Yellow
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| D300s 105mm Macro ISO200 f9 1/200th no exposure bias |
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| D300s 55mm ISO250 f22 1/60th no exposure bias |
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| D300s 200mm ISO200 f8 1/640th (+1/3rd stop) |
Initially, I found yellow a bit tricky to accurately capture in plants - the two plant images here are the best from a very large selection I took. In many instances the subtle differences in the intensity and brightness of the yellows was not recorded - I think this was due to the high luminance of the petals and the bright conditions in which I was photographing. I found that the larger the plant was in the frame (on capture), the better the results. Those images with a larger area of (relatively) smaller plants tended to end up with simple blobs of indistinct yellow.
Orange
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| D300s 105mm Macro ISO200 f11 1/13th (+1/3rd stop) |
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| D300s 200mm ISO250 f6.3 1/1250th no exposure bias |
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| D300s 82mm ISO200 f5.6 1/2500th (-1/3rd stop) |
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| Panasonic DMC FZ28 ISO200 f4 1/320th no exposure bias |
Orange was an easier colour to photograph than yellow - the images shot more closely represented the subject matter. However, trying to find oranges of the same hue as the colour wheel proved a little more difficult than I'd imagined. Photographing a bunch of oranges might still take place..
Orange is a secondary colour in the painters' colour wheel - a mixture of red and yellow. It retains some of the luminance of yellow, but with the more 'solid' properties of red.
Although the oranges were easier to photograph than the yellows, they needed a bit more in-camera manipulation to match the colour wheel - I suspect this is because there are more variations in orange (as opposed to yellow).
It was while photographing the orange & white striped wash bag that I became consciously aware that I was not trying to replicate the scene I was photographing, but the colour on the wheel. Trying to accomplish this in-camera was fine for this staged still - life, but a little more awkward for the bonfire and pan of curry shots - both taking place in busy public events. Both of these images encompass a variation in the hue of orange, as opposed to the more solid blocks of colour in the other two images; the deeper oranges representing the colour wheel.
Both images also feature areas of black - this has the effect of emphasising one of the psychological properties of 'warm colours' - they appear to 'move forward' from the page or screen (Webb, 2010, p60)
Red
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| D300s 105mm Macro ISO 200 f3.5 1/50th (-1/3rd stop) |
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| Same Settings but at 1/30th with VIVID Picture Control selected |
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| D300s 31mm ISO200 f7.1 1/160th no exposure bias |
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| D300s 34mm ISO200 f10 1/125th (-1/2 stop) |
The primary colour red is very abundant, both in nature and man-made objects. My findings in photographing red were similar to those of the first exercise - the strength of the red was enhanced, and more closely matched the colour wheel when slightly under-exposed.
Obviously the hue of the objects had an effect on this, but objects painted red tend to fade quicker (or simply more obviously?) than other colours, so the in camera 'boost' may be required as a result. Red is an 'advancing' colour and 'is perceived as one of the strongest and densest colours' (Freeman 2007, p115).
As an experiment I also used the camera's Picture Control (colour enhancement) setting to demonstrate how it effects red. The initial strawberry image is not only the closest to match the colour wheel, it also accurately replicated the scene I was photographing. Viewed on its own the image looks fine - when viewed alongside the more 'vivid' manipulated jpeg it appears dull. In the same way the vivid image appears fine when viewed in isolation, but over-processed when compared to the 'neutral' jpeg setting of the camera - with least processing.
Violet
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| D200 50mm ISO100 f2.2 1/250 (-1 stop) |
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| D300s 170mm ISO250 f10 1/25th (+1/3 stop) |
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| D200 105mm Macro ISO400 f7.1 1/1000th (-2/3 stop) |
I found violet to be a bit elusive - especially the hue represented on the colour wheel. Even now, the images I've posted aren't as close a match to the colour wheel as with the other colours. Many things that may first appear to be violet, upon closer inspection, are nearer to a deep blue. I think that violet is one of the hardest hues to accurately visualise and identify.
All three objects posted here required adjustments to the camera's metered exposure. The 'red' cabbage, a solid object, needed to be over-exposed, whereas the translucent glass and petals required relatively heavy under-exposure.
I have less violet 'frame filling' objects in my photo library than any other colour - I was interested to note that all three examples contain only violet and white. Other violet images I have also contain yellow - this appears to dominate and makes selecting a colour wheel violet even trickier.
Blue
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| D200 105mm Macro ISO320 f5 1/25th (-1 stop) |
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| D200 16mm ISO 160 f20 1/20th (-1 stop) |
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| D200 105mm Macro ISO250 f14 1/50th (-1.7 stops) |
Blue, the colour of the sky - easy right? OCA colour-wheel blue, not so easy. The blue on the colour wheel in the course text is very dark, I'd even go so far as to call it indigo. It's so dark that even a polarised Yorkshire sky in summer was way too grey..
Thanks must go to Brittany farmers, the huge embroidery / bead collection of t'wife and The Blue Man Group fridge magnets for providing blues of (nearly) sufficient darkness to let me get somewhere near the right hue.
Freeman (2007, p115) suggests that blue 'recedes.. is relatively dark and cool' and that it's a colour that many people have difficulty in judging precisely. As can be seen, all of these images involved heavy under-exposure to deepen the blues - supporting Freeman's observation.
With the beads and fridge magnet this isn't a problem as they both have shiny surfaces and maintain their vibrancy, but the painted window shutter, in being underexposed by a stop, looses impact and appears to recede even further. This might be recoverable with a bit of post-capture enhancing of saturation and vibrancy levels, but had I not been attempting to match the colour wheel, I would have selected this version - metered as being the correct exposure:
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| D200 16mm ISO 160 f14 1/20th |
Green
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| D300s 105mm ISO200 f16 1/100th no exposure bias |
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| D200 105mm Macro ISO400 f7.1 1/800th (-2/3 stop) |
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| D300s 38mm ISO250 f10 1/100th (- 1/3 stop) |
Green - the colour of nature, is the most easily distinguished by the human eye - we can perceive more shades, or hues, of green than any other colour. It's association with nature has led to green being sybmolised as a calming and natural colour.
The green of the colour wheel does not have the richness or the luminance of a jade or emerald green, it is more neutral, as such it neither advances or recedes. Trying to perfectly match that colour was a task made more difficult by the ability to perceive the slightest shift in a green - our eyes are too accurate when comparing greens.
Before they were displayed so closely together I thought that the images above were all pretty similar in hue. It's obvious that they aren't, but they each contain such variations in shade, that I'm sure the colour wheel green is in each of them somewhere..
Conclusion
I found this exercise frustrating and rewarding in equal measure. The frustrating part being trying to match a perfectly good scene, full of colour, to the colour wheel. I took many images that weren't close enough to manipulate by the exposure controls of my cameras - these have, however, been filed and have provided a good start to a catalogue of colours.
I did enjoy the narrow brief of capturing images dominated by a colour - as I said at the start, this is something that I've never consciously done; apart from sunsets that have included a vibrant orange, but that would probably be the only time I've photographed a single colour for it's own sake.
I have become a lot more aware of the photographic and compositional opportunities the colours in themselves present. The exercise has also made me more conscious of bracketing at point of capture - I'm aware of the technique, but it is not something I do so much, due to the ease of manipulating later via computer software.
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