More light & color May 25, 2008
Posted by tcbp in : Color Vision, Photography , add a commentOften, when it’s late in the day and I’m tired or haven’t had the opportunity to think of anything good before-hand, I wind up wandering around with my camera trying to find something for the photo-a-day project. I often carry a flash and an off camera cord for it just in case it might be useful (and it often is). Several days ago I was doing just this, and found that with some bounce flash I could get some really interesting shapes and colors out of some glass mixing bowls.
For lack of a better name these have been unofficially dubbed Fiery Rings 1 and 2. I also did some variations in processing where I changed the color temperatures to make them turn blue, but I liked what looked (to me) like it had the color of fire. My trouble with color came up here again because I wanted them to have nice reds and oranges, and based on the RGB value I think I got to that point for the most part. Hopefully they still look that way to “color normal” observers. I am trying to balance the amount of color and saturation here; I don’t want it to go too far, but I certainly don’t want to desaturate it.
Pushing the white balance around is always interesting for these abstract things because I don’t really find there’s a right or wrong, and it eliminates the need to mess with colored gels on the flash when I’m shooting. If I want some color that’s not blue, red, yellow or somewhere along those lines though colored gels do tend to work better.
I fully intend to go back to these and not only try different colors, but try to get multiple colors to exist within one frame. That may be trickier, they may all just end up blending in to one color but I’m hoping it will work out.