outdoor photography

Often the term monochromatic is thought to be synonymous with black & white.  But actually the term simply refers to compositions of just one color.  The composition may contain gradations from black to white, but all the in between is one color. It sometimes take a fair amount of planning to to exclude all colors from an image except for the one you want to keep.  As you can see from the photo above, there's still some pesky green grass cluttering up my image.  But by and large, this photograph is a picture of brown. I thought the color fit the mood of the scene.  After all, the car is long dead--it was pushed up a hill by a hurricane that came through Daniels, MD in the early 70's.  The trees are barren--the leaves are brown and the sky is grey (sorry, it had to be done).  The decay on the car mirrors the loss of life in the trees.  Thankfully, life returned to the trees in the spring, even if the same did not hold true for the car.

Sunrise at Deep Creek I'd like to look a little more closely at groups of analogous colors , particularly when making compositions using warmer colors or cooler colors.  If you're not familiar with the distinction, the best way to begin to distinguish between warmer and cooler colors is to think of the colors of the rainbow:  Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.  The colors closer to the red side of the rainbow are warmer colors.  The colors closer to violet are cooler colors. Sunrise at Crescent Beach The two sample photographs above were both taken at sunrise, but the colors in the photograph at Deep Creek are distinctively warmer than the photograph taken at Crescent Beach.  Look at the feel of both photographs.  I know that they are different subjects, but on the basis of the color alone, how does the "temperature" of the photograph affect the mood of each image?

Beginning photographers are often attracted to a particular composition because of a particular color in the scene.  It may be the blueness of the sky or the greenness of the grass. Perhaps in the fall, you are amazed by the brilliant red leaves of a sugar maple tree.  Color is a great compositional device.  However, it can be made even stronger when colors are composed in relation to other colors in your scene. You can take a picture of a beautiful purple flower, but what's the color of the background?  Is it grey gravel from the nearby road?  What would happen if you took the picture from a different angle so that the background was green grass?  Compositions can be vastly improved when the colors surrounding your subject are taken into account. Even those of us who pretend not to care about the clothes we wear know that certain colors clash when put next to each other.  In photography, you can arrange the color patterns to make sure that the...