Perennial rudbeckia

click photo to enlarge
After the last two posts I feel the need for colour, and what can be more colourful than the bright yellow petals of perennial rudbeckia against the deep blue of an early autumn sky? In our garden we have a few clumps of these striking and long-lasting flowers. They are a variety of coneflower, one of four genera (including Echinacea) of the Asteraceae family, and are especially useful in bringing strong, bright colour to the garden after the flowers of high summer have faded.

My usual view of these blooms is against the leafy backdrop of the borders in which they reside. So, their yellow sits alongside green. However, for this photograph I made the conscious decision to get down low with the camera - in fact I held it at arms length inside the clump - and photograph upwards to place their colour and the shape of the flower heads against the plain blue of the sky. In the RGB colour model wheel blue and yellow are opposite each other. This makes them complementary colours. A feature of such pairs is that when they are placed next to one another the effect is to increase each colour's visual intensity. As the evenings begin to draw in and the first misty mornings remind us that summer is waning, photographing vibrant colours of this sort is my way of hanging on to something of the departing warmth and sun.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 10.4mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Gaillardia and cornflower

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One of the trees at the front of our house is a large, fairly old, crab apple. When we bought the house we looked at this tree and despaired at the treatment  (and lack of treatment) that it had received. As a youngster it appears to have been badly pruned causing a tangled knot of branches to erupt from the top of a relatively short trunk. It looks like neglect was the next course of treatment it suffered resulting in each of these branches shooting up and outwards like an exploding firework. But, the somewhat ugly-duckling appearance notwithstanding, the tree has promise. It is much used by birds, looks magnificent when it is in blossom, and produces a fine crop of crab apples in autumn that are much appreciated by the same birds. Consequently we instigated a programme of pruning to bring it to a better shape. We've raised the canopy a little each year, cut out some of the interlocking branches and restricted its spread. It is slowly improving.

However, it sits in the centre of a smallish flower bed which, from May onwards, the crab apple's spreading leaves make quite dark. Early flowers such as daffodils, tulips and even bluebells manage fine but perennials and annuals find the location more of a problem. Our recent solution is to treat it as a bed for left-overs, foundlings and self-seeded flowers. The resulting mix is a riot of leggy colour that a neighbour says brings a smile to her face every time she passes through our gate. I've photographed these flowers recently and found that my best shots come when I wait until the blooms are illuminated by the low, evening sun that gets below the tree's branches. This strong light produces bright colours, deep shadows and edging halos.

Today's main photographs show a small part of the planting and the main image showcases the complementary colours of the gaillardia and the cornflower. The observant will also notice some lemon yellow snapdragons and deep red poppies in there too. The smaller photograph is a contre jour shot of a section of the flowers showing the jumbled mixture of varieties and colours.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 300mm
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO: 320
Exposure Compensation: -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Rhythm and hues

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Of the three major pairings of complementary colours my favourite by a large margin is blue/orange.  Red/green I can appreciate with flowers, leaves and grass - in fact, we have red geraniums (pelargoniums) every year because of the big return you get from their petal colour next to their leaves. Purple/yellow, leaves me cold though; too garish by far. However, I enjoy that delicious blue/orange mix so much that sometimes I barely realise I'm using it, though usually it's a very deliberate choice. Examples in the blog include these trees and buildings, these flowers and their deliberately chosen background, this Euphorbia, ladybird and background, and these spring maple leaves against a blue sky.

What artists have realised down the centuries and what photographers learnt from artists is that some of the qualities of "pure" complementaries extend to "near" complementaries. If, for example, you put brown (rather than orange) next to blue the pairing offers attractive qualities that derive from the fact that, as a colour, brown is close to orange. I'm sure it's this that explains why my preferred combination for split toning is blue/sepia. I've tried other pairings such as cyan/green, magenta/orange and red/sepia, but have always gravitated towards my favoured colours (see this building interior and this sea-front promenade).

Perhaps similar reasoning can be adduced for my liking of the colour pairings in today's photograph. It shows tongues of rippled sandy Lincolnshire beach at low tide. I liked the repetitive rhythm of these small spits and I isolated sections of them with a long lens. The title of today's blog is a blatant steal and amendment of an off-licence I saw in Barton upon Humber, one of a chain apparently, called Rhythm and Booze, which is itself a play on the name of the style of music of almost that name.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 120mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Ladybirds and colour

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If this blog and my photographic records are anything to go by it seems I notice ladybirds only out of season: that is to say, at times other than summer. When I was processing today's photograph I was wondering why this might be. It occurred to me that it could be because in summer the bright red/orange of these beetles doesn't stand out against the kaleidoscope of colour that flowers are offering, whereas in spring, autumn and winter the odd bright spot provided by the even odder ladybird foolish enough to brave the cool or cold weather sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.

I photographed today's specimen in a churchyard as I walked down the stone path to the south porch. The parishioners had planted a variety of annuals and shrubs to line the route. The blue-green of a clump of euphorbia was working well with the dark orange of some fading tagetes and I composed a shot that included these near complementary colours placing the shrub in focus in the foreground and the blurred flowers in the background. As I hunted for a suitable composition I spotted the ladybird and included it for the sharp point of deep colour that it added to the shot.

photograph and ext (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 105mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The fascination of weirs

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Over the years I must have spent many happy hours staring at river water as it pours over a weir. Being raised in the the Yorkshire Dales near the fast-flowing River Ribble exposed me to a number, and I remember, as a child, being fascinated by the way water passed over them, changing from a slowly moving, smooth sheen to an organised, falling turbulence which finally became a turmoil of frothing foam. Like most people, when I see one today, I still stop and look at it.

The weir in today's photograph is small compared with those at, say, Settle or Langcliffe on the upper Ribble. However, size isn't a crucial factor in enjoying a weir, and a diminutive example has the advantage of concentrating your attention on a smaller, ever-changing area. This one is on the River Slea in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, near Cogglesford Mill. The old water-mill is at a point where a navigable part of the river falls into the natural, meandering water-course, and has structures around it - walls, bars, grilles etc - that are no longer used. What caught my eye here was the complementary contrast of the reflected yellow leaves of the overhanging tree with the blue of the sky. I consciously composed the shot with three distinct horizontal bands. However, it wasn't until I got home and had the image in front of me on the computer that I saw the solid, dark lines - one large, and the other smaller - across the bottom of the top of the three sections. What caused them? Then I remebered that there was a bar, wooden I think, fixed across the watercourse a foot or two above the lip of the weir, and the lines are its reflections.

Incidentally, the water above the weir was smooth and quite reflective, but the passage of a few ducks had caused the turbulence that broke up the tree's reflection a few seconds before I took the photograph. For another of my weir images see here.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 154mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 1250
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Using complementary colours

click photo to enlarge
We've been choosing flower seeds for the garden recently. One of the locations we have to cover is a small section of fence behind which are our refuse and recycling bins. In front of the fence is a small square patch of ground that in recent years has grown squash, tomatoes, and various kinds of flowers. Last year we grew a Chilean Glory Vine up the fence, but this year we are trying something different. We'd never grown that particular plant before, but we both concluded that it was inappropriately named - "Glory" it wasn't! In its place we'll have Thunbergia alata (Black-eyed Susan) and Ipomoea tricolor (Morning Glory - "Heavenly Blue"). We hope to have the complementary colours of yellow/orange and blue on display at the same time.

Complementary colours have figured in the work of many painters. Perhaps the best known in this respect is Van Gogh. In a letter to his brother Theo, speaking of his painting of the "Night Cafe" he says, "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four citron yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens...." Red and green are, of course, complementaries, and like all such colour pairings, their juxtaposition makes each appear more vivid and vibrant. Van Gogh is best known for his paintings of sunflowers. He made many studies of vases of these blooms, including some that are orange. Where he paints them this colour he often uses a complementary blue background, as in this example.

Our current living room flowers are orange chrysanthemums, and when I came to photograph them I searched out a piece of blue paper paper for the backdrop. I have a particular liking for the combination of orange and blue, especially a "kingfisher" blue, and have sought it out before in a photograph of cockerel feathers, and used it in an arrangement of Chinese Lanterns (Physalis franchetii).

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro, (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

Yellow leaves, blue sky

click photo to enlarge
Autumn is a time of year when, depending on the turn that the weather takes, you can convince yourself that it's still summer or you find yourself lamenting the onset of winter. As I type this "reflection" the area of Lincolnshire in which I live has had a full day of light rain - the first such day for months - that brought with it thoughts of the darker, colder, shorter days to come.

However, two days earlier, when I took this photograph, the sun was shining on the brightly coloured leaves of the maples. As I looked up into a tree and framed this shot, full of bright yellow, deep blue and clear white it almost seemed like I was looking back into summer: only the slight edge on the wind and the crunch of leaves beneath my feet reminded me that it was definitely autumn.

The yellow/orange with blue of this image shows the power of complementary colours, each deepening the apparent hue of the other, and generating a vibrancy that has appealed to artists, photographers and designers down the centuries.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 86mm (172mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On