Art Rich Photography Photographer
Learning About Color Photography
While black and white photography has long been the photo class standard, there comes a time when every photographer wants to experiment with representing the world in the exact way that we see it – in color. Adding color to images brings its own set of complications and requires the photographer to have a firm understanding of the basic elements of photography, but can still be broken down into a few easy to understand elements.
It Starts with Contrast
With black and white photography, contrast is the difference between the darkest and lightest tones in a picture. Summed up, you can think of it as “how white is white?” Basically, black and white photography only has high, medium, or low contrast. In color photography, contrast gets a little more interesting.. Color photographs have color contrast, as opposed to the tonal contrast of black and white.
Color contrast is determined by the way each of the colors interacts with the colors surrounding it. While the contrast can still be adjusted to push bright to dark ratio, the colors in a photograph appear different depending on what’s around them. For example, if you have someone sitting in a field of dark green grass wearing a white shirt, the bright white of her shirt will standout against the green grass background.
Color Temperature
Whenever you take photographs in color you will have to keep an eye on their color temperature. Different lights will result in different color temperatures, in the same way that the sun looks different at different times of day. While there are a lot of technical measurements for color temperature and the way it interacts with actual temperature, we can think of it in terms of tint.
Tint and color temperature are actually referred to as “white balance” in photography. How this works is that film and sensors are made with a specific kind of light in mind and anytime a picture is taken in a different lighting situation it impacts whether or not the white looks truly white. As an example, you may have noticed that photographs taken under fluorescent lights have a greenish tint; this is a result of the color temperature of those lights.
How to Use Temperature
When shooting in color, it is important to understand which color temperature or tint is best for the image you’re trying to create. Warm, reddish tints, like those at sunset, are flattering to most skin tones while buish tints are better for neutral product pictures.
You can adjust your white balance several different ways- you can do it with your camera, by using filters, editing the image in the darkroom or by using photo editing software. Similar to aperture and shutter speed, it’s usually a good idea to take a photograph several times with different white balance settings to give yourself the most flexibility after the shoot is over.
Learning how to master colors is a skill that takes lots of practice. Photographers often take several courses on color as part of their education, and there is no shortage of competing opinions on how color can be used best to achieve certain goals. How you frame your pictures is also another area of debate. Do you use subdued frames like natural brown picture frames for landscape or do you use bright orange picture frames for city scapes?
If you’re just getting started with color, the best first goal is to accurately capture the environment the way that you saw it. Once you can do this reliably with color photography, you can start working to manipulate these colors to add to the narrative of your photographs. And as usual, find what works works best for you and have fun doing it.
Film Trailer- The Rich Have Their Own Photographers
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