Controlling Color

 Every time we take a photograph, we think about color. More precisely, our subconscious tells us how we feel about the photograph based on the colors in it. In order to become a better photographer, we then have to learn what the colors mean and then learn how to control the color in a photograph in order to get the feeling we desire from that photograph. So our assignment for color was to take 20 photographs focusing on each color on the color wheel. I will be the first to admit that some of my ideas fell short, but such as it is when you have to come up with six different ideas for one assignment, at least half of my ideas were pretty decent. The biggest challenge is that we were not allowed to take a photograph of something that was the color we were working with just for color's sake, we really had to bring the right feelings to a photograph with the color in it.



Green was one I had a hard time with as you can see. Green is supposed to be soothing, refreshing, and evoke feelings of peace, harmony, ecology and nature. I really couldn't come up with anything interesting, so I just went to a place that I knew was really green and tried to take some interesting photos. It works for the feelings I was trying to go with, but it's pretty literal as well, so I'm sure my professor wasn't too thrilled with these ones.



While I was working on this assignment, we were at my mom's house visiting her after her surgery, so I thought I would get my blue done. Blue is supposed to be peaceful, confident, cool, trustworthy, and remind us of the sky and ocean. I knew I couldn't just take a photo of the ocean itself, so I took some interesting photos of the jetty that separates Long Beach from Seal Beach. While out shooting for this one, it was quite an adventure too as I ended up slipping on the jetty while my camera was over my shoulder (and a lens in my pocket). Luckily I fell to the other side to protect my camera, but bruised my hip and shoulder pretty badly. My dad teased me about worrying more about my equipment than myself, I just told him that at least I have insurance for my body, not my equipment. After all that, I was pretty pleased with my photos, only to have my professor say that the ocean and sky weren't blue enough (and joked about how I should have gone to Hawaii--uh, yeah, he's hilarious). I guess that's what you get in So Cal when all the beaches are dirty and you have to wait for the marine layer to burn off in the morning before you get a blue sky. Maybe I should have just slept in.



I had trouble coming up with ideas for purple as well, but I found this great textured blanket at the store on clearance for real cheap, so I thought about having Lindsay dress up as a queen. Purple is calming, royal, eccentric, spiritual, wealth, and well liked, so obviously I was going for royal here. I thought it was kind of a cute idea until my professor took a look and told me it was too literal. Oh well. Lindsay had fun posing for me here (for the first few minutes anyway).





Now getting to some of my better ideas, I saw this bright orange shirt and sunglasses and knew I had to buy them for Lindsay to pose for me in since she's such a cutie (not that the other two aren't, but she's more likely to pose for me than they will). So orange is warm, energy, flamboyant, happiness, stimulating, and attention-getting. I was going for flamboyant here with her sitting in a chair in the swimming pool in February, but after taking a look at the photos, I realized they didn't work as well as I wanted to because February in Arizona looks like summer in other places so you don't have any indication that it's not a nice summer day here. For the record, the pool is absolutely freezing in these photos and I know that for a fact because I had to get down into the pool in order to the the perspective I needed for these photos. So, good idea, but it fell flat a little.



Yellow I came up with the idea for pretty quickly, but struggled a little with where I was going to do the photos and who I was going to ask to pose for me. I ended up asking my friend Tricia to model for me (who you might remember from last semester's photos as well). She's so beautiful it makes it easy to take nice photos, and we had a fun time out there making each other laugh so it was fun (for me anyway). Yellow is positive, optimistic, happy, energetic, sun, and it fatigues the eye. I wanted to go for something happy and sunny, so we ended up with some yellow flowers and my friend. I'll have to post more of her photos in another post because so many of them turned out nice, but I haven't had the chance to edit them yet. This one is my favorite though.




Finally is red, and this is the one I did the print of and turned in. This was the one I came up with the idea for almost instantly and I knew I wanted to light it with mostly candles, so there's very little light in these photos (which, unfortunately blew out the back of the photo where the candles were in the frame). I wanted to go back and shoot this again to get the candles out of the background, but I messed up the lighting the second time by trying to add too much light which really changed the way the photo felt. I thought that I'd be able to replicate what I had done before since I had done it once and learned that it's almost impossible to take the same photograph over again even if you control as many of the variables as you can. In any case, red is intense, love, attention-getting, confident, hot, and a stimulant. I thought this photo fit the bill on all of these counts and added a few elements that made it just a little different than a standard love photo.

So now that we've learned more about color, hopefully I can really start paying attention to color in my photos and make them better by making better choices about what color to use in different places. As challenging as this assignment was, I was really happy that we focused on this.