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The Fun of Learning Color Photography

By Autumn Lockwood

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 04Oct2010 Word count: 591 Viewed: 226 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Although black and white photography has been the standard for beginning photography students for a long time, at some point every photographer should learn the basics about color photography. Adding color to images brings its own set of complications and requires the photographer to have a firm understanding of the basic elements of photography, but can still be broken down into a few easy to understand elements.

It Begins with Contrast

In black and white photography, contrast refers to the difference between the lightest and darkest elements of a photograph. In essence, you can think of contrast as "how white is white?" With black and white photography, there are really only three tones: low contrast, medium and high contrast but with color photography it gets a little more complicated. Color photography has color contrast compared to the tonal contrast of black and white.

Color contrast is determined by the way each of the colors interacts with the colors surrounding it. So, although you can still adjust the contrast and push bright colors darker, the colors will look different in the picture depending upon the colors around it. For instance, think of a baseball sitting in bright green grass - that image has high color contrast because the bright white of the baseball will stand out against the cool green of the grass.

Your Color Temperatures

Any time you're taking pictures in colors, you have to pay attention to the temperature of the colors. One thing that will affect the color temperature of your picture is the different types of lights that you use. Although there are lots of technical measurements of color temperature the simplest way to think of it is in terms of tint.

Tint and color temperature are actually referred to as "white balance" in photography. How this works is that film and sensors are made with a specific kind of light in mind and anytime a picture is taken in a different lighting situation it impacts whether or not the white looks truly white. As an example, you may have noticed that photographs taken under fluorescent lights have a greenish tint; this is a result of the color temperature of those lights.

How to Use Temperature Properly

When shooting in color, it is important to understand which color temperature or tint is best for the image you're trying to create. Reddish, warm tints such as those provided by a sunset are flattering to most human skin tones, while cooler, bluish tints are best for neutral product photography.

You can adjust your white balance several different ways- you can do it with your camera, by using filters, editing the image in the darkroom or by using photo editing software. Similar to aperture and shutter speed, it's usually a good idea to take a photograph several times with different white balance settings to give yourself the most flexibility after the shoot is over.

Color theory is a complex art that professional photographers work their entire lives to master. The theory behind the use of different colors is a controversial and complex topic as photographers often use different colors to help achieve certain emotions in their photographs.

If you're just starting off learning to use color, then your first goal is to accurately capture the image the way you see it. Once you can do this reliably with color photography, you can start working to manipulate these colors to add to the narrative of your photographs. And as usual, find what works works best for you and have fun doing it.

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