Using a Limited Colour Palette

In any photograph that we take, we make a decision about what to include in and what to exclude from our image.  There are many different factors that will affect our choice, but one which is always important to me is about colour.

Will I include lots of different colours in my photograph, or just a couple of shades?  As with many other choices, there is no one answer which will be right in every situation.

Using a large colour palette, that is, including a lot of different colours in your image, can lead to a dynamic and visually exciting photo.

However, it can also lead to visual confusion if you’re not careful – the viewer’s eye gets pulled by so many different, competing colours that it doesn’t know where to rest in the image.

For this reason, using just two or three carefully chosen shades can sometimes result in a visually more sophisticated photograph.

The colours that you choose can be either harmonising or contrasting.  Two or three harmonising colours will make for a gentle, restful image, while using a couple of contrasting shades will produce a photo with more impact.

This photo of chamomile flowers contains only yellow and white with a touch of green.  The simplicity of the limited colour palette leads to a gentle image, and the freshness associated with these light colours is enhanced by the tiny water droplets.

You can become even more minimalist in your colour palette by using different tones of only one colour.  This photo of part of the roofline of a building in Greece actually contains only white, although the areas that have fallen into shadow have taken on a blue-grey tinge.

(The blueness is caused by the cold colour temperature of the light in shadowed areas on a sunny day – see my blog on 11 May).

When you set a subject against a background of the same colour, sometimes the only way to make the subject stand out is to use differential focusing, i.e. to adjust your aperture so that the subject is sharp and its same-coloured background goes out of focus.

Personally I love limited colour palettes, and always look out for the possibility of a photograph which might use just two or three shades.  It can be fun to try – if you haven’t done it before, maybe look for some suitable subjects this weekend and send the results in to our monthly competition!

If you would like to learn more about composition consider taking Phil Malpas’s course on Finding the Picture

101 Photographic Tips, blog, Composition

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How to create a cameo photograph.

When you head off to a new location with your camera, it’s always fun to look for a cameo picture that sums the place up, as well as taking the more general, overall views.

This applies especially if it’s a well-known, much photographed place – for instance, cities such as Venice, London, or New York, or iconic buildings like the Eiffel Tower, or even rural scenes such as the lavender fields in Provence.

When you come back from a place or a country that you’ve visited, you obviously want to have photos that show it in a general way, even if you know that the pictures are more of a record view than something creative.

But on top of these, it’s even more satisfying to try to find your own, personal angle on a place.

Sometimes this more personal photo can result from using an unusual viewpoint, a high or low angle, or in the case of a building, using a telephoto lens to pick out just a part of the whole.

Or it may be a case of photographing a small detail which somehow sums up the essence of the location.

I was lucky enough some years ago to visit Bhutan, an amazing country where the landscape is very unspoilt, and all the buildings are in a traditional style.

While I was there I photographed the palaces and monasteries, such as this fabulous monastery perching on a sheer cliff face.

It would have been strange and sad to come back from Bhutan without any photos of these places – but I knew at the time that I wasn’t doing anything different from hundreds of other photographers.

So all through my trip I kept my eyes open for a smaller picture, a detail or cameo that said “Bhutan” to me, but wasn’t the obvious view.  As in other Buddhist countries, prayer flags were everywhere, continually fluttering and moving in the breeze.

So I decided to photograph some prayer flags, and chose a few which were rather more brightly coloured than some of the others.  I isolated them against the blue sky, and used a polarising filter to saturate the colours.

I didn’t want to freeze the movement, because the prayer flags I saw were never static, so I put my camera on a tripod, and set a shutter speed long enough to give me a little movement blur.

I couldn’t have ignored the general views in Bhutan, especially as it’s a place I’m only likely to visit once in my lifetime – but the other, cameo, more personal photos like the prayer flags added the extra dimension which I was hoping for.

If you would like to know more about travel photography why not consider taking Keith Wilson’s Travel & City Break Photography course or Nigel Hicks’s Capturing The Essence of Faraway Places

blog, Documentary Photography, Travel Photography

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How to photograph a wildflower meadow

There can’t be many photographers who would stand at the edge of a field of wildflowers and not want to make a photograph of it.

However common the flower is, seeing it en masse makes it something special – a carpet of bright golden buttercups or a sea of scarlet poppies is almost guaranteed to lift your spirits and make you reach for your camera.

I’ve found though that once I’ve recovered from the euphoria of first seeing the meadow, it can be surprisingly difficult to make a good photograph of it.  Imagine the buttercups – a frame filled with just yellow actually doesn’t have much to hold the viewer’s attention, and somehow doesn’t convey the emotion that the scene itself gave you.

But a view of the buttercup field set in all its surroundings may well not work either, if there are unsightly buildings or roads or pylons or any one of hundreds of possible things that may detract from the beauty of the scene.

The ideal – which I always hope for but seldom find – is a single tree growing somewhere in the meadow.  Then you can use a zoom lens and frame carefully to include the tree surrounded by flowers, excluding any unwanted elements.

The tree now acts as a focal point in the picture, holding the composition together.  Consider setting it off centre in the image for a more visually interesting composition.

If you’re not lucky enough to find a suitable tree, sometimes a fence around the field can be used in the composition, especially if it’s a wonky old fence with a bit of character rather than a brand new regular one.

In this photo of phlox and other wild flowers in Texas, I made use of the old fence to anchor the composition – this was definitely helped by the fact that the flowers were growing in profusion on both sides of the fence.

If there are no trees or fences or other focal points, then just fill the frame with flowers!  It will be easier to make an interesting photo if there is more than one colour of flower in the meadow – in this case, you can think about the placement of the different colours in the frame to try to make a balanced and harmonious composition.

Often a longer lens will help with this, as in this photo of coreopsis, Indian paintbrush and bluebonnets, again in Texas.  Here I used a telephoto lens to frame the photo as carefully as possible, avoiding any bare patches or scrubby areas, and the long lens has compressed the perspective in the scene, making the image look almost two dimensional – a tapestry of flowers!

blog, Flower Photography, Landscape Photography

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Understanding the color temperature of light

Different types of light have different colour temperatures, making them appear warmer or cooler.  This means that a white object photographed in different types of light may take on a red or a blue cast, instead of appearing pure white.  However, we may not always be aware of this, as our eyes and brains compensate all the time for colour temperatures, and unless we concentrate on it, we tend to see all light as much the same.

The camera’s sensor however doesn’t compensate in the same way, but will accurately record the colour temperature of the prevailing light and any colour cast that is causes on our subject.  For instance, if you’ve ever taken a photo indoors under normal room lighting (tungsten light), without using a flash, you’ll probably have noticed an orange cast in the resulting photos.  This is because tungsten has a warm colour temperature, which the camera has recorded.

Even natural daylight can have a wide range of different colour temperatures.  The colour temperature of sunlight on a clear day will be warmer when the sun is near the horizon at dawn, gradually getting cooler as the sun rises in the sky, and then warming again as the sun goes back down towards the horizon.  So a landscape photographed at midday will have a cooler, bluer cast than one taken at sunrise or sunset.

I photographed this sand dune just after sunrise when the sun was still very low, and the warm colour temperature of the light has really intensified the orange colour of the sand.  As the sun rose higher in the sky, the orange became less intense, and the sand looked paler and more yellow.

On an overcast day the light will have a cooler, bluer cast.  And on a sunny day, areas which fall into shadow will also have quite a cold blue cast to them.  Here’s another sand dune picture which shows this effect:  the shadowed side of the white sand dune has taken on a bluish, rather indigo tone – although to my eye at the time it just looked grey.

In the white sand dune photo I actually quite liked the blue cast on the sand, but often a cold cast won’t be desirable.  This is where the white balance menu comes in.  It has a range of settings for different colour temperatures of light – usually including at least daylight, cloudy, shade, and tungsten, as well as an auto setting where the camera will do the best it can.  Setting the cloudy or shade option will warm up the image and remove the bluish tint.

If you’re shooting RAW files, then adjustments to the colour temperature can also be done in your image processing software.

If you would like to learn more about Colour temperature and the effect is has on your photography then why not take Phil Malpas’s course A Master in Light & Colour

101 Photographic Tips, blog, Color Photography

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Foregrounds in wide angle photos

Wide angle lenses can be great for adding a sense of space to a landscape photograph, giving it plenty of drama and impact.  They exaggerate the perspective in a scene, and make closer objects appear larger and more prominent, while pushing the distant elements in the scene further away.

A wide angle lens will also include a large amount of sky or foreground or both, depending on how you tilt the camera.  However, because they do include a large amount of foreground, it’s important to make sure that there is something interesting in that area – it’s very easy to concentrate on other elements in the scene, and not notice that a lot of plain grass or earth is being included in the lower part of the frame.

In that case, you might end up with no interesting visual information in the bottom third of your image.

In the same way, it’s worth thinking about how much sky you include with your wide angle lens.  If you’re lucky enough to have some good cloud interest, then a wide angle lens will make it look even better; but if the sky is bland, plain blue or just overcast, there’s no point including too much of it in your photograph.

When there is something interesting in the foreground, then a wide angle lens can really make the most of it.  And if it’s the ground itself that’s interesting, then consider getting down low to emphasise it even more.

In this photograph above of parched earth in Namibia, I wanted to show the patterns and shapes made by the dry, cracked mud.  I knelt down and used a 24mm lens, angling it so that most of the frame would be taken up by the earth in the foreground.

This emphasised the patterns, and made them appear very dominant in the image.

I took this photo of a snow capped mountain many years ago, but it remains one of my favourite wide angle photos because it’s a bit of a visual trick.

At first glance, I think you would say that the mountain is reflected in a lake – but in fact the water in the photo is only a puddle, no more than two or three inches deep.

From standing height, the reflection was hardly noticeable, but when I lay flat on the ground it became much more evident.  I used a 24mm lens and held it just above the level of the water.  This really emphasised and exaggerated the reflection.  Needless to say I also got extremely wet!

101 Photographic Tips, blog, Landscape Photography

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