Part 3 - Colour - Exercise 2 - Primary & Secondary Colours

Above is a graphic of a colour wheel taken from the internet. The colour wheel shows the 3 primary colours, Red, Blue and Yellow as well as the 3 secondary colours Green, Orange and Purple.

In this exercise I have taken 6 photographs of a scene that individually feature or are dominated by one single colour from the colour wheel.

Each image is taken at the cameras correctly exposed setting then another 2 shots were taken, one stopped up the other stopped down. Where this couldn't be down at the point of capture, I recreated the under and over exposure in lightroom.

Primary Colours

 Red

Stopped up

Correct Exposure

Stopped Down

Here I took a photograph of a row of red training shoes in a shop, lit with spot lights from above. I only took one shot and stopped up/down in lightroom. The correct exposure made with the cameras meter shows a deep red fabric with intense saturation and slightly dark in brightness but when stopped up the red becomes pure and bright. Under exposing the image created a much deeper and overly saturated red almost beginning to darken to black in the shadow areas. For me the stopped up image best matches the red in the colour wheel.

Blue

Stopped Down

Correctly Exposed

Stopped Up

I found this stain glass window in the Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow. I liked how the light coming in threw a nice blue light around the room. I took 3 separate photos, the correctly expose at 1/40s f8 and stopped down to f11 then stopped up to f5.6. I'm going to go with the lighter stopped up image as the one more like the colour wheel blue with both the darker images making the blue in the bottom windows too dark and going towards black in the stopped down image.

Yellow

Stopped Down

Correctly Exposed

Stopped Up

I used bananas for yellow and used Lightroom to under and over expose. With daylight coming in from the right, there is a slight highlight across the top of the bananas which gets washed out when the exposure is stopped up. But I feel it is this image that matches the yellows best to the colour wheel delivering a good, bright and pure yellow.

Secondary Colours

Orange

Stopped Up 

Correctly Exposed

Stopped Down

This mural found in Glasgow's city centre has a predominant orange Hue with the figures in a neutral grey. The saturation is weak in the under exposed image and slightly dark, the correctly exposed is dull with average brightness and the overexposed giving generally the most intense and bright orange which I feel is similar to the colour wheel, although as with all the images there is a differing light to dark exposure running left to right, this was due to the light coming in from the main road lighting this arched close where mural was found. So the left hand side of the overexposed image does have an area of pure and very bright orange, but I feel the majority of the image has an orange similar to the colour wheel.

Green

Stopped Down

Correctly Exposed

Stopped Up

For green I found a kids garden spade. Here I feel the overexposed is rather unsaturated and fairly bright, the correct exposure saturated and average brightness and feel the underexposed to be the closest to the colour wheel green with intense saturation and slightly dark. 

Purple/Violet

Stopped Up

Correctly Exposed

Stopped Down

This sculpture was used to capture purple, three shots were taken at f5.6 f8 and f11 all 1/30s. For me the correctly exposed image is the most like the colour wheel purple with a saturated and dark colour surface. I have to presume though, that with my metering system on average for the whole image that with the white background the camera has done what it always does with white and underexposing it as it tries to find the medium grey. So I am presuming that the correctly exposed labelled image is probably 1 stop underexposed, meaning the closest to the colour wheel is technically the stopped down labelled 'correctly exposed' here.

In conclusion to this exercise I admit it has alerted my attention to colours that are all around me but have been largely ignored on my part. An enjoyable exercise that opened my eyes to the many kinds of colours that build up our world both indoors and out.