Posts Tagged ‘Color’

Color & Contrast

January 27, 2012
By Alister
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As most of us know, our cameras do not always reproduce the scene we are capturing as we experience it. Regardless of how sophisticated or expensive our tools, often we have color casts or lack of contrast. Often, we are actually responsible for the adding the color casts, for example if we use graduated Neutral Density Filters – only the most expensive are truly neutral, the rest tend to add a magenta color cast. Other examples are Blue/Gold Polarizers, or Big Stopper 10 stop ND filters.

Natural Color Casts happen in twilight, sunrise and sunset or at night, when in camera white balance can get thrown off quite badly, especially in mixed lighting conditions.

Of course, some of these color casts at sunrise or sunset make our images look fantastic, the brilliant warm colors are so appealing, but are they authentic?

January 19, 2012
By Alister
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The Art of Composition is to articulate a meaning, a mood, to tell a story. Photographs have most impact when the subject is clear, the emphasis we put on it is called Visual Weight. If your primary subject is well separated in the frame, the viewer should be left in no doubt as to our intention.

Let us look at this example of a monk standing in Durbar Square in Kathmandu, Nepal; the figure and his shadow are the only subjects in the frame. Notice how I say SUBJECTS, because most people would say there is only ONE Subject, the Monk – but in fact, his shadow is also a subject, and the point of this article is to consider the Visual Weight of ALL elements within the frame.