Thursday, September 10, 2009

Colour combinations

click photo to enlarge
In a post in 2008 I made the point that in painting (and photography) "sometimes it's all about the colour." That is to say, the subject, composition, etc, play second fiddle (or no fiddle at all) compared with the importance of the colour.

This shot is a case in point. It shows the last few plants for sale on a rather basic dispay at a garden centre. There are some rather straggly geraniums (pelargoniums if you prefer), a cranesbill and a house leek, arranged quite haphazardly on shelves in front of the end of a shaded greenhouse (glasshouse if you prefer!) The composition isn't as I would have had it, given any choice in the matter - I'd have kept only the geraniums, and re-arranged the pots so that a few red blooms were lower down too. However that doesn't matter to me, because I do so like the colour combination of the blue of the shelves, the green of the shading, and the violent red/orange of the blooms. The green of the leaves add subtlety and detail, but any qualities that the shot has comes (to my mind) mainly from the colours themselves.

Your point of view may be different!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 19mm (38mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On