Re: Re: Colorful Life

#20113
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

Hey Michael!

How is life in Barcelona these days? I loved Barcelona when I was there recently. I have so say your photography is surely improving quite dramatically and that’s great!

You’ve obviously proven that you can simplify a photograph by using color and that’s the goal of the assignment! So job well done here.

On your first photo. The color almost looks too punchy. It pops too much and looks almost orange. Just beware if you’re doing any post processing on these images that you don’t increase the vibrancy or the saturation too much as it eventually looks unnatural. It could also be the white balance was not set.

Either way I feel that your first image is a nice close up of some pasta, it just looks too organe-yellow.

Your second photograph is positively delightful. The photo is nearly perfect except for one thing, the flower itself has marks on it. If you want to achieve perfection you need a more perfect subject! Like this:

[attachment=0:efm2elux]flower-on-black-background.jpg[/attachment:efm2elux]
blanche / white 2 by OliBac, on Flickr

But that is not a problem and you can always find more perfect flowers to photograph. The point is this photo is GREAT and the color in the middle of the flower really pops. This is because you’ve isolated that color.

Your final photo is also nice although not as good as the flower. It could be composed a little tighter and potentially shot in portrait not landscape. Also some of the LEDs are cut off in the red light but that’s a minor compositional problem.

Overall you’ve done really well here.
Use this technique to improve your images going forward. Simplify with color and your images will certainly have a great impact and be more interesting. Complex images can even be simplified using color.

This technique is used in many of these images:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/03/japan_earthquake_aftermath.html

Complexity is simplified through color palette.

Good job and I’m excited to see your next work.