Colour Relationships

I don’t know why but I’m still struggling intensely with this section of the course. maybe because when I’m taking my photos, I don’t tend to think about the colours of the object in my scene, I seem to think abut they way the look and feel and the message that comes across. This latest exercise was to show how different colours interact with each other and what the best ratio of complimentary colours would be and to produce images in correspondence with this.

The ratios are as follows:

1:1 Red Green

1:2 Orange Blue

1:3 Yellow Violet

This shot of the jacket hung up in the garden has the correct ration of green to red to harmoniously balance the two colours so one is not more predominate that the other. I adjusted the shutter speed on my camera to allow enough light through the lens to brighten the colours in the image that were being exposed by the bright natural sunlight.

 

 

The evening sunset in this scene provided the right colours of orange and blue to create a very pleasing effect on the eyes. I played around with my ISO settings to achieve the right colour temperature for the fading sunlight. I’m still getting to grips with ISO but finding it allows me to use the aperture and shutter speed that I would like without the image becoming too dark or too light

 

There is quite possibly too many tones in the colours of the rings to classify them as yellow, but the ratio to the purple which also has different depths of tones still works well. These are my parents wedding rings. I also used a flash to add to the gleam of the gold used and create more shadows in the purple fabric, but I think this affected the look of the gold too much.

I can see from the above photos that too much of one or other of the complimentary colours would effect the balance and offset it so that one element would become more dominant than another. They make more harmonious pictures because one colour is not fighting for all the attention, where as in some of the shots leading up to the final images didn’t quite have the precise ratios, and so felt weighted towards one colour too much and creating too much dramatic tension.

This is not to say that this type of colour tension cannot be used to amplify the photograph you have taken. Colours represent culture, feelings, emotions and ideas. Depending on where you are brought up or your own personal view depends on how you perceive colour, for example red to myself shows love and passion and anger, but in China it is believed to be a lucky colour. Below are some more of my shots that I have liked the way the colours are working with or against each other and why I believe they work.

For this indoor shot I used a long exposure of 1/30 secs and a high ISO of 800 to over expose the light in the room and the colours of the children's toys. It has washed out the colour of the light floor and the colours in the toys appear brighter and really stand out on the very stark background. It makes them seem very striking and fun to look at.

 

This portrait of Holly was taken outside and I used a slightly higher ISO of 400 as my camera was automatically choosing to use 200, but I wanted a photo that showed off the bright colours of her clothing and to slightly over expose her features. The day was really bright and she was in a good mood which I wanted to capture in the colours she was wearing.

 

 

The balloon was passing by one evening and the very bold rainbow colours on it are made even more intense by the powder blue sky surrounding it. it becomes a very impressive focal point because the tone of the sky being lighter makes the primary colours appear very strong.