As you know, I have quite a menagerie of pets. I own a chameleon that can't change colour. He has a reptile dysfunction.
And today I thought of a colour that doesn't exist... but then I realized it was just a pigment of my imagination.
Is shooting in black and white an artistic affectation? A clumsy attempt to mimic the old masters of photography, to try to co-opt their look on your contemporary shot? Just one more iPhone filter? It's certainly not to be 'more true to life'. Real life is in colour.
No, I think it's problem solving, actually.
So a tip for beginners - colour is *so* powerful in our minds, that it can dominate the impression we have of any scene. All interior designers understand this. It draws attention to itself - think of a red stop sign, a pair of blue eyes, an orange sunset.
This is why if the real topic of your photo is geometry like my picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge below (somebody who complains they can't see the cyclist properly is completely missing the point, he is not the subject), texture (like feathers), tones or patterns, then getting rid of colour means getting rid of its distraction to that topic.
In fact, for a long time, colour was thought to be too distracting from those graphic design elements for use by serious photographers - it took Joel Meyerowitz, Ernst Haas and others to show that's false, it depends entirely on the subject matter.
To finish with, there's the story of an old man sitting next to a young punk on a bench in the park.
The punk has a mohawk 16 inches high and all different colors and the punk can just feel the old man staring at his hair.
After a few minutes, the staring gets too much and the punk turns to the old guy and says:
"What's the matter, old man? Never did anything crazy before?"
The old man replies: "Well I screwed a peacock once, just wondering if you're my kid."
The rest of the series here:
Clackers' Beginners Tips (Collected) - PentaxForums.com
Last edited by clackers; 04-14-2022 at 09:26 PM.