Re: Re: Assignment #5 – Color

#19151
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

Wonderful work! Spectacular photographs.

It’s easy when the idea is to focus on color, to fall into the trap of not having a strong secondary element to help give the photograph something interesting to explore. An image composed of a limited gradient of greens will often be too simple for many people to enjoy.

You’ve done a great job of incorporating strong secondary elements which help give your photographs with a limited color palette a life of their own.

Let’s start by going through your images.

The first image of the green leaf is great. It’s monochromatic and uses different gradients of the same hue. You’ve kept this image alive by using lines and shapes as your strong secondary element.

The concern I have with this image is that the focus is soft. It’s not noticeable with the image isn’t enlarged. But when I enlarge the image I notice the softness of the focus. It’s worth bracketing these images with different focus settings just to be safe. In the lens or small LCD the results may not be noticeable but you’ll be happy about having a choice of images with slightly different focus when you edit the images in your editing suite.

It’s also worth using the “expand focus” on your camera if you have one when you’re working with macro photography like this.

Your second image is equally as strong and uses the color palette of blue, green and red. Your image abides by the rule of thirds and has identifiable depth (i.e. foreground, middle ground and background).

Your last image has the most dramatic tone out of all of your images due to the positioning of the colors on the color wheel as well as the prominence of the purples and pinks. In this image, shape and texture play a strong secondary element. In fact, I can even see the small hairs inside the flower. Beautiful image!

Great work! I look forward to seeing your next assignment.