Exploring Color Photography

To start exploring color photography let's look first at how to create harmony through the use of a single colour.

Exploring Color Photography: Harmony

The photograph below could virtually come under the monochrome photography tips section as it is composed mainly of one hue.

It is this restricted palette of warm colours of reddish-brown hue that creates a mood of relaxed harmony which goes well with the sleeping subject.

There are many vertical and horizontal line within the composition which also add to the calm mood. The lines of the woman's body and the horizontal of the chair arm are the only diagonal lines which act as a counterpoint and draw your eye to the sleeping woman.

Contrasting colours can also create harmony but the mood would be more upbeat and the lack of strong colours in a composition make a visual exploration of the subtleties of similar hues possible.

Exploring Color Photography: Spot Colour

Too many colours in a single picture can be confusing. A photograph is sometimes more successful when there is one color that outweighs the rest.

The colours within the photograph above are mostly of a similar hue, i.e. a warm reddish brown. The use of a single spot of colour which is more intense lifts the image out of the ordinary while retaining the harmonious mood.

While the orange of the blanket is a fairly strident or aggressive colour, within the context of other warm colours which are near to it on the colour wheel, the effect is vibrant rather than discordant.

Although the blue of the sky is almost opposite the orange of the blanket on the colour wheel, the blue is less saturated than the orange and so does not compete with it, allowing the orange to dominate.

Exploring Color Photography: Contrast

This photography tips is about colour.Colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel form pairs called complementary colours.

These complementary pairs are yellow and blue, orange and purple, green and red.

Making one of these pairs central to your composition will give a dynamic, but balanced, feel to your composition.

In the photograph above, the red of the woman's gloves and shoes and the red bucket form a complementary pair of colours with the green foliage.

The two strong diagonal lines that meet at the woman's feet help to keep the viewer's eye within the picture frame and create a strong composition.

For complementary colours to work well in this way, they need to be equally saturated otherwise they will be unbalanced.

Exploring Color Photography: Primary Colours

Photography tips on colour wouldn't be complete without talking about the three primary colours. In painting, these are red, blue and yellow, however, Leonardo da Vinci said that there were four primaries, the fourth one being green.

The photograph above uses all four primaries which is potentially confusing as each one struggles to dominate. However, each colour occupies a relatively small area of the photograph and the whole is held together by the dark green area of water.

Unusually, the subject is facing away from the camera and although the bar of soap tells us what she is doing, the real subject of the picture is the abstract coloured shapes.

In painting, green is not considered a primary colour as it can be derived from a mixture of blue and yellow, but psychologically it seems to carry as much weight as red, yellow and blue. Perhaps this is because of the abundance of green in the natural world.

Digital photographs can be viewed on a computer monitor by the addition of coloured lights. This is known as an additive colour system and the primary colours of this system are red, green and blue.

The beginnings of color in photography are credited to James Clark Maxwell who gave instructions to photographer Thomas Sutton in 1861 which led Sutton to create the first ever colour photograph using the additive colour method.