07

What Does Colour Contribute?

BECAUSE COLOUR IS ENTIRELY A FUNCTION OF LIGHT, this is as good a place as any to discuss it, though these chapters should not be considered necessarily sequential. As these are all questions related to the making of images, you could ask them at any point. In fact, these questions can also be asked in an evaluative way when you’re making edits and selecting one image over another or in post-production when, for example, you’re trying to decide if adjustments to the colour are needed and why your eye keeps drifting off to that one element in the frame that captures so much of your attention but is not the point of the image.

Colour is really seductive. Our brains are hardwired to pay attention to colours and assign them meaning. Colour has tremendous visual mass, a term related to how much an element pulls at our eyes, though in reality it’s about how much meaning and attention our brain gives one element over another. In the case of colour, we are drawn to brighter colours over more muted hues, and to colours that provide the most contrast with the rest of the scene—especially reds and yellows, the colours of choice for emergency vehicles, caution signs, and the big Buy Now buttons on websites that grab our attention. That’s good when you want it, but not helpful when what you want, for example, is harmony in the image or for the eye to rest elsewhere in the frame.

Paying attention to the colours within the frame and asking whether they support or fight against your intention is important. It’s counterproductive to have colour pulling at your viewer’s attention when you’re trying to guide that attention elsewhere. We also assign tremendous emotional weight to colour, so when it comes to the kind of mood you want the image to have, colour is an important consideration. Chapter 22 is devoted to the question of mood and whether it matches the subject you’re trying to express so I won’t steal that thunder, but it’s important to remember the connection. If the image’s mood isn’t what you want it to be on an emotional level, ask yourself if the colour fits.

Since the big idea of this book is to provide a series of questions to get you thinking about matching your choices about elements and devices with the subject of the photograph, the obvious next question, at least for me, is “Does the colour contribute at all?” Colour is not always easy to work with. In the real world, we have very little control over the colours in our scene, which makes having a unified colour palette in a single image—let alone a series of photographs—often hard or impossible to achieve. One solution is to change the colours in post-production, and since our work in post-production is often as much a part of the creative process as the initial image capture, it’s worth a nod. Software tools now make it easy to make your greens a little more blue or a little more yellow, to desaturate the reds, or even to replace colours entirely. How much you choose to adjust in post-production is very much a matter of taste, but if you choose to do that kind of colour work, the question about the colour’s contribution to the best expression of the subject is even more relevant.

Even if you don’t opt for that kind of colour work in post-production, the question remains; it’s one of the reasons I do so much of my work in black and white. I want my images to have a harmony about them, and most of the situations in which I photograph make finding colour harmony a challenge. But my decision to remove colour is based on other criteria as well. If the image just isn’t about colour (or the colour isn’t the point), a more powerful image is often made when that colour is removed. If, for example, the image is about the relationship between two people—the moment at which they kiss, perhaps—then I want the photograph to be about that moment, about the tenderness, the intimacy. If there’s a bright-red element in the background that constantly pulls attention past the lovers and their moment, then I am allowing that moment to be robbed of its impact if I don’t remove the colour.

Photographing in black and white, or choosing to render colour work in black and white later in post-production, allows other elements to play more powerfully. With colour gone, the eyes can give more attention to texture, gesture, lines, moments, or story. When those things are more important in the image, colour might be an unnecessary distraction. I often remove colour because removing it unifies my work and allows photographs that are neither about colour nor the mood it provides to be more powerfully about something else.

More often than not, it’s the interplay between my chosen subject, my own tastes, and the real-world constraints in which I photograph that determines whether my photographs end up in full colour or in monochrome. But always, in every case, the question that guides these choices is “Does the colour contribute—not just to the image, but to the strongest expression of my subject—and can I use it to strengthen what I want to say about the subject?” If it doesn’t contribute, or worse, if it competes for my attention, then I remove it in one way or another. I might move my perspective to exclude that red element, use a different lens, or wait for a better moment. And when those possibilities fail, I exclude it in post-production (usually by converting the image to black and white), but with the knowledge that hue, saturation, and luminance can all be adjusted so that the colour contributes rather than competes.

Questions to explore about the possibilities that colour gives us include:

• What colours are present in this scene, and do they work together?
• Are there colours that compete with the more important elements in the scene, and can I exclude them?
• Do the colours in the photograph help establish the mood?
• Is colour important to this subject, and could black and white be a stronger choice?
• In post-production, could subtle changes to hue, saturation, or luminance create a stronger, more unified colour palette?

What you do with the answers to these questions will always be a matter of taste and your vision for the photograph itself, but colour is too important to the way we experience a photograph, and too powerful a tool in the way we make that photograph, not to be intentional about exploring and using it.