Sunday 27 June 2010

Colour: Primary & secondary colours

This section I have really struggled with, probably through myself over thinking the issue, but I have found it very difficult to reproduce the primary and secondary colours in photography. At first I thought it would be easy, but as I shot more photos, I realised that the true primary and secondary colours are very hard to come by naturally. An object I would have described as red, when it was photographed showed that it had many shades of brown, orange and red to create what I perceived as true red, and the images relayed this back to me with each change of aperture and shutter speed, giving depth to some of the colours I didn’t know were present.

Below are my examples of the photos I took that closely matched what I thought were the true primary and secondary colours, and as you can see some of them were close, and some were quite a way off.

Primary’s:

DSC_0036 DSC_0034 DSC_0035

As you can see with the tomatoes, you would usually say straight away that a tomato is red, but bringing out that quality in the photograph was much harder than merely taking the shot. By changing the aperture each time it seemed to bring out more orange tones than deep reds.

DSC_0087 DSC_0088 DSC_0089

This series was more successful as the colour of the wall and the liquid was more of an aqua shade of blue to begin with, so by altering the aperture to each shot it achieved a much deeper blue

DSC_0083 DSC_0084 DSC_0085

This was probably the least successful and hardest colour to replicate in my photography. Yellow has so many hidden tones within it and the slightest change to light can alter the yellow to white right through to brown shades. The T-shirt itself in the image was actually a bright sunny yellow, but as you can see I struggled to capture this properly.

Secondary's:

DSC_0010 DSC_0011 DSC_0014 (2)

This is my favourite set of images as I played more with the shutter speed to let more light in for a longer length of time into the lense, and it heightened the lightness of the orange tones in the rose in our garden.

DSC_0014 DSC_0016 DSC_0017

Greens were the easiest colour to capture for me, maybe because we live in a very green country! But the subtle changes in greens were easier to enhance with the use of aperture, making them go from a very light vibrant green, to a much deeper and darker green.

DSC_0039 DSC_0037 DSC_0038

Purple shows the changes in the depth of colour the best, it becomes very light, almost white with a high aperture, and the intensity of the colour increased with the smaller apertures used, although I’m still not entirely pleased with the results as I couldn’t get the right balance between light and shadow.

Overall, this exercise has taught me a lot about the ways in which aperture and shutter speed affect the shots you are taking. the subtle changes in aperture intensifies the colours, and the longer the light is let in by the lens the more over exposed the colours become. These are the most important lessons I have learnt so far, but still I require an awful lot of practice in understanding exactly what my changes to these settings will mean to my final images, I’m yet to full harness how to use all of these skills at once effectively, but I hope with time and practice it will come more naturally.