sabbatical week 2: colour
Welcome to week 2, during which I am going to challenge myself to explore the world of Colour. I prefer black and white photography for a plethora of reasons, not the least of which is, colour horrifies me. Very much outside my comfort zone. I fixate on things like the colour not matching what I remember in my head, how the sun and the shade mess with the hues and tones and saturation, how people's skin always looks too ruddy or too yellow or too bruised... I am prone to spending hours getting the skin colour *just right* and twiddling with the exact tone of this dress or that shirt or the bloody TREES that drive me batty for not just looking like the green I saw them when I was right there myself and before the stupid SUN got involved and made them look all white or yellow... ~pant pant pant~
>insert deep cleansing breaths here<
This week what I am hoping to do is step well outside that comfort zone and capture and manipulate colour photographs. I'm going to make some loud 50's beach party technicolor-saturated pictures, and some delicately tinted pictures, and some pictures that feature the bane of my existence: R-E-D.
(This bit's for you, TM.)
Most really vibrant happy colours DO NOT convert well to (my preferred) black and white. Bright happy blues, obnoxious pinks and noxious oranges, vulgar fluorescents and poppy reds lack depth when they are shot in black and white, and come out looking like bland flat featureless bits, lacking the lovely gradations that are the only thing you have to worry about in B&W. A loud gerbera just does not look as lovely as a pastel one when you're wanting a nice black and white image.
(Note the difference between the yellow one and the pastel peach one on the botton right.)
So here's a lesson to all y'all about those fancy coloured filters you might have seen on some people's lenses - they aren't used for colour photography. They are so that the reds or blues or greens will they have depth when shot in B&W. But I digress.
Where was I? Oh, yes. The beach, as the pictures might have hinted at.
Today we set out to take my sister and the kids to the beach. We stopped at a beach we'll call Ghetto Stank Beach first, hoping to make a happy mistake, but it was just a mistake... The day use area was about 12 metres wide, smelled like rotting fish entrails and duck poo, and was inhabited by a hodge-podge assortment of trailer trash that seemed to have migrated north for the summer from someplace down in Inbreed Park, Alabama . I'm still trying to eliminate the image of a very large cottage-cheese textured woman in a not large enough bathing suit chowing down on a whole family-sized bag of ketchup chips, crumbs on her lips and ample bosom, who decided to heft herself up with her butt facing me, exposing the dead looking hamburger flesh between the tops of her thighs. I wasn't trying to look. And God help me, I did not look away fast enough. ~shuddering~
We vacated shortly after gagging down our picnic, which tasted a lot like rotting fish entrails and duck poo since that was kind of the overpowering scent in the air and headed for the beach at Elk Island, which although smattered with its own healthy collection of ducky doo (and maybe a buckalo plop or five) was guaranteed to be a vast improvement. We enjoyed several hours there digging in the sand, netting tadpoles and minnow, and dodging duck poop. The sky and the clouds started turning and we got to watch the rain storm build over the lake and follow us home on the highway above the fields of canola - the clouds were bloody amazing, and made for some really awesome colourful pictures.
Colour week. Bring on the red.
>insert deep cleansing breaths here<
This week what I am hoping to do is step well outside that comfort zone and capture and manipulate colour photographs. I'm going to make some loud 50's beach party technicolor-saturated pictures, and some delicately tinted pictures, and some pictures that feature the bane of my existence: R-E-D. (This bit's for you, TM.)
Most really vibrant happy colours DO NOT convert well to (my preferred) black and white. Bright happy blues, obnoxious pinks and noxious oranges, vulgar fluorescents and poppy reds lack depth when they are shot in black and white, and come out looking like bland flat featureless bits, lacking the lovely gradations that are the only thing you have to worry about in B&W. A loud gerbera just does not look as lovely as a pastel one when you're wanting a nice black and white image.
(Note the difference between the yellow one and the pastel peach one on the botton right.)
So here's a lesson to all y'all about those fancy coloured filters you might have seen on some people's lenses - they aren't used for colour photography. They are so that the reds or blues or greens will they have depth when shot in B&W. But I digress.
Where was I? Oh, yes. The beach, as the pictures might have hinted at.
Today we set out to take my sister and the kids to the beach. We stopped at a beach we'll call Ghetto Stank Beach first, hoping to make a happy mistake, but it was just a mistake... The day use area was about 12 metres wide, smelled like rotting fish entrails and duck poo, and was inhabited by a hodge-podge assortment of trailer trash that seemed to have migrated north for the summer from someplace down in Inbreed Park, Alabama . I'm still trying to eliminate the image of a very large cottage-cheese textured woman in a not large enough bathing suit chowing down on a whole family-sized bag of ketchup chips, crumbs on her lips and ample bosom, who decided to heft herself up with her butt facing me, exposing the dead looking hamburger flesh between the tops of her thighs. I wasn't trying to look. And God help me, I did not look away fast enough. ~shuddering~
We vacated shortly after gagging down our picnic, which tasted a lot like rotting fish entrails and duck poo since that was kind of the overpowering scent in the air and headed for the beach at Elk Island, which although smattered with its own healthy collection of ducky doo (and maybe a buckalo plop or five) was guaranteed to be a vast improvement. We enjoyed several hours there digging in the sand, netting tadpoles and minnow, and dodging duck poop. The sky and the clouds started turning and we got to watch the rain storm build over the lake and follow us home on the highway above the fields of canola - the clouds were bloody amazing, and made for some really awesome colourful pictures.
Colour week. Bring on the red.
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