Colour and emotion

I thought it was definitely time I started to look at the impact of colour on how we feel emotionally.  Colour as a device to influence feeling has long been established in art, advertising, marketing and just about any phase of life where we might be susceptible to having our perceptions and feelings changed and many worthy papers have been generated on the subject by psychologists and others who would wish to influence us.  The Colour Affects  website carries a neat summary of the basic feelings associated with different colours and a personal synthesis of views from various sources (e.g. Freeman (2007) and Color Psychology) point at the conclusions I have drawn below.

Red has power and is the colour that takes attention of the viewer first as it has the property of appearing nearer than it actually is (never noticed the nearness thing – must check).  Obviously widely used in warning signs and lights.  It is negatively associated with aggression, defiance and stress and positively with warmth and strength and excitement and energy.  It is often linked with masculine symbols (Ferrari, Marlboro, Red Bull, McLaren to name but a few).   Red is used linguistically as well as visually to indicate strong emotion (e.g. red hot, red handed, see red etc.) so its perception covers several levels of human emotion.

Green is the universal colour of peace, harmony and tranquillity and has a refreshing psychological impact although it does have some negative connotations tending towards tedium and boredom.  The wavelength of green light is in the middle of the visible light spectrum and its restful and balanced qualities are attributed to this.  At a very deep psychological level, it has been suggested that green is the colour of growth and food and therefore has a calming effect at a fundamental human level.  There are linguistic connotations again here – actors relax in the green room, and negatively, green with envy.

Blue is seen as an intellectual colour and its positive associations see it used in advertising to offer efficiency and trust in business and finance and also with logic, calmness and coolness.  Its association with water also sees blue as reflective and serene and features extensively in advertising around certain holiday destinations and medications.  It is claimed that bright blues are stimulants to thought and paler shades influence concentration.  Much used by companies who advertise management consultancy and according to numerous Google sources, is always voted as the top colour in the world and features in more sports kits than any other.  However, on the negative side, it can also been seen as cold and unfriendly.  If you go to Colour Affects and complete the poll, you will find that blue was the favourite colour from over 340,000 people who have clicked the survey!

Passion, fun and sensuality are apparently conveyed by orange (strange then that it is the colour of the Dutch!!) as well as carelessness and lack of concern for impact.  Orange used with black is associated with particularly negative feelings and lack of gravity. 

Yellow is claimed to have a strong emotional effect and cause a psychological boost and outburst of creativity as long as it is the within the right tonal range and in association with the ‘correct’ other colours.  According to Colour Affects, get it wrong and your confidence and self-esteem will plummet.

Violet is the shortest wavelength (remember ROYGBIV from school  ?) and reputedly has spiritual qualities around awareness and ultimate truth – not sure I go for that, but it is widely referenced.  Negatively it is seen as a colour which gives feelings of negativity and feelings of smallness and insignificance.  It has strong associations with top quality and is widely used in various regalia associated with monarchy.  However, advertisers assert that overuse of violet/purple make people think of low quality and tacky products faster than any other colour, which is interesting.

There is a vast amount of information on colour available from books and the internet, and I have no intention of trying to produce an exhaustive treatise where many others have been before, but I did feel it essential to record a few thoughts on the emotional impact of colour at this point in my learning.  On reflection, it might have been an unwise choice to publish my blog in black and orange, so I hope assessors do not get overwhelmed with feeling of negativity, lack of gravity and violence as they read !!  I have no intention of tangling with the workings of Blogger at this stage to change anything, so I’ll just note the point and continue!!

Introductory texts

There has been recent debate on the student forum regarding the textbook issued by OCA to accompany The Art of Photography.  Graham Clarke’s “The Photograph” stirs mixed emotions as far as broad accessibility of the text is concerned, and I certainly found it quite hard work to read, steeped in classic ‘artistic’ English and flowing prose as it certainly is.  I think it does however deal very well with the historic development of photography and with the major photographers who have contributed to the development of the still image, although I do find the intensely detailed (and I think entirely speculative) interpretations placed upon some of the photographs difficult to rationalise.  The Diane Arbus image “A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, New York, 1969” seems to me to be a shot of just that, yet Clarke (on page 31) attributes “a larger condition, at once cultural, social and in this instance, psychological” and a whole plethora of interpretations based around elements of the image.  I just don’t see it and it reminds me of English lessons at school when I was taught about how Shakespeare must have been feeling when he penned certain scenes in Macbeth ..  However, the image recently sold for $91,000, so I guess I must be wrong !!

I have looked at a couple of other texts that delve into the history of photography and consider the photograph as contemporary art.  These were “Photography : a cultural history” by Mary Warner Marien (2002) and “The Photograph as Contemporary Art”  by Charlotte Cotton (2009).  Cotton is a concise work that is clearly subdivided into photographic cultural genres although retains some of the feeling of Clarke (2007) in terms of the linguistic devices used, but Marien is far more accessible, at least in my view, in terms of the language deployed to discuss the history of photography as an art form.  However, and it is a big however, Marien is a massive tome the size of a telephone directory, with 532 pages of small font, although with significantly larger pictures (it is a bigger book!) than the other two offerings.  Overall, I think Clarke is a good introduction in terms of its concise nature and its focus on the ‘classic’ images and photographers, and I can understand why it was chosen by the OCA, but Marien achieves more for those with time on their hands or wanting to dip into it without necessarily following the structure imposed by the author.

Location, location, location .....

I have given a lot of thought to places that I could visit to take photographs that address various aspects of the course.  These would have to be within reasonable distance of home (less than an hour) and ideally afford opportunities to shoot design themes, colours, lighting etc. in a few visits.  Local scenic spots and buildings lend themselves well to some elements of the course and churches and churchyards are a rich source of possibilities (especially shapes).  One of the best location types I have found for design elements and people are preserved steam railways (no, I’m not a train spotter!) and these also give opportunities for shooting colours and movement. 

London obviously has limitless photographic opportunities, although I have chosen to focus on the Embankment area to reduce the strong likelihood of chasing off after too many themes! 

The potential locations that I planned to include in TAOP have been marked on a map that has been included in my hard copy Learning Journal along with the subjects that I plan to focus on when I am there.

I have learnt so far that it is good advice to have a list of shots I definitely want to take before visiting a location and then to ensure that I capture these to their best advantage with respect to distance, angle and lighting before getting diverted onto anything else.

Exercise 9 : The Frame : Focal lengths

This exercise was all about the impact of focal length and the amount of a scene that can be included in a photograph taken from the same spot.  I looked at a number of locations for this exercise, particularly seeking out places where there was a reasonable opportunity to get an unobstructed view of the subject for the longer range shots.  I planned to shoot this sequence twice, once using an object and once using a landscape.

For the object series, I settled on Pitt’s Bridge, a five span bridge over the River Blackwater in Berkshire.  It was originally built in 1717, although has doubtless been modified and repaired at intervals since.  It has the advantage of facing east-west and the red brickwork lights particularly well at dusk and dawn.  I went for an early morning shot and took four photographs, slightly recomposing at the longest focal length to achieve a better visual balance to that image.

The first photograph (24mm) was the widest angle I used and it shows the environment of parkland, the surrounding trees and the river flowing towards the bridge, i.e. it sets the scene and tells the whole story.  At 55mm the amount of view is less, and the parkland setting has disappeared with the image being more about the river and immediately surrounding trees. At 105mm, the image is starting to be really just about the bridge, and the final image, shot at 200mm, shows only the bridge.  The last image in many ways is the most interesting as it captures the details of the bricks and old ironwork as well as giving a glimpse under the arches to show the construction beneath the spans – much more intimate and interesting to me, and certainly my favourite image from the set.

As the focal length got longer it was clear to see that the angle of view closed in and there was greater apparent magnification of the image.

Technical details:

Canon 5D Mk II with 24-105mm f/4 and 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS lenses

24 to 200mm       |     ISO200

24mm

55mm

105mm

200mm

So, that’s the end of the introductory ‘Getting to know your camera’ project then .. It’s been an interesting experience and one from which I have learned a lot.  Although I have experimented with the influence of aperture and shutter speed on the outcome of a shot many times before, it has always been within a fairly narrow zone around what I thought would be optimal for the shot I had in mind.  The exercises took me to a much wider spectrum of settings and I was surprised to see the appearance of some quite pleasing images at settings I would never have contemplated previously.  I shall especially experiment with some slower shutter speeds than I would normally consider as the course develops.

So, it’s onwards to ‘The Frame’ .....

Exercise 5 : Introduction : Panning with different shutter speeds

The fifth exercise was designed to explore the relationship between shutter speed and apparent motion in the resultant image whilst panning a moving object.  The moving object was at home this weekend, so made a number of passes on a bicycle whilst I took pictures at a range of shutter speeds between 1/1000^th second and ¼ second with the camera set in Tv mode.  The slowest shutter speed I have shown here is 1/350sec and this I treated as the baseline where the object and background showed no signs of motion blur.

The bike turned out to be a good choice as it offered a range of different movements to observe – the rotation of the tyre, the rotation of the spokes and the movement of the bike itself as it passed along in front of the background.  AT 1/350sec the tyre tread was visible as were the spokes, and the background was sharp.  At 1/180sec the tyre treads were starting to lose definition and the spokes were starting to blur, although the background remained sharp.  At 1/90sec the spokes were more blurred and the background also started to show lack of definition and this became progressively more pronounced at 1/60sec and 1/45sec as would be expected.  The image taken at 1/45sec was the first that really started to show the effects of speeds and was the most pleasing of the images to my eye – although significantly blurred, it did really capture the speed of the bike along the track and I preferred the more pronounced effect to the images taken at faster shutter speeds where the blur was less significant.  1/10sec and 1/6sec were seriously streaked and not that pleasant to look at, although the image taken at the slowest shutter speed I used, 1/4sec, was the most streaked and was actually my second favourite due to it’s rather abstract qualities whilst still being clear what the subject was and showing its speed.

This was an interesting exercise to carry out and I saw three distinct phases in the sequence that I shot.  The initial phase of ‘frozen motion’ offered little and was dull, whereas the ‘sweet spot’ for the sequence was around 1/45sec where there was enough blur to impart interest and make it a more dynamic image.  The final phase, and one that surprised me, was the slowest speed tested in that although it was completely blurred, I found it a very pleasing effect.

Technical details

Canon 5D MkII

Canon 24-105mm f/4 L IS at 62mm. ISO800

1/350sec

1/250sec

1/180sec

1/125sec

1/90sec

1/60sec

1/45sec

1/30sec

1/20sec

1/15sec

1/10th

1/6sec

1/4sec

A blog and a log ..

I’ve decided to keep a physical learning journal as well as the online blog.  The idea is not to replicate elsewhere what is here, but to give myself the chance to organise and develop ideas around some of the material that I have been collecting from events, magazines, online prints etc.  I envisage something of an annotated scrap book at the moment, but we’ll see how it goes .. Physical material from the events described in the next post will certainly go in there as a better home than trying to scan stuff and publish it in the online blog.

Exercise 4 revisited .. with a little help from Nelson

Although my initial efforts addressed the brief of producing a set of photographs that demonstrated the influence of shutter speed on movement of the subject, I felt that a more photogenic setting would have helped the cause.  A trip up to London, initially to research some images for the ‘Contrasts‘ assignment and also to go to the World Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum and the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, gave me the chance to look at water movement again, this time using the fountains in Trafalgar Square.  I wanted to get the movement going across the frame, so although I did shoot several sequences of the famous fountains, I spent most time with the squirting dolphins (at least, I think they are dolphins!).  These gave a consistent and rapid water flow and also gave me the chance to get close with the minimum of disruption from tourists.  I’ll write more about the two exhibitions and what I learnt there in a later blog after I have assimilated my thoughts on an awful lot of very different pictures.

I shot 12 images from 1/6000sec down to 0.3sec.  I also observed the influence of shutter speed on aperture: the table below shows the relationship as the camera sought to maintain ‘correct’ exposure.

1/6000sec         f/4                    1/3000sec         f/4                    1/1500sec         f/4

1/750sec           f/4                    1/350sec           f/5.6                 1/180sec           f/8

1/90sec             f/11                  1/45sec             f/16                  1/20sec             f/22

1/10sec             f/22                  1/6sec              f/22                  0.3sec              f/22

This was a far more powerful water flow than in the weir pool exercise and 1/1500sec was the slowest shutter speed at which I would say that the water was frozen in motion.  AT 1/180sec the water plume had lost all definition and this gradually declined further as the shutter speed decreased.  At 1/20 sec individual droplets of water were streaked right across the frame.  The images I took are shown below.

Technical details:

Canon 5D Mk II with 24-105mm f/4 L IS lens

82mm       |     ISO200

1/6000sec

1/3000sec

1/1500sec

1/750sec

1/350sec

1/180sec

1/90sec

1/45sec

1/20sec

1/10sec

1/6sec

0.3sec

Some thoughts so far ...

Having completed some of the exercises and started to scope out ideas for the first ‘Contrasts’ assessment, I have been thoroughly enjoying myself ... even to the extent that I have been putting more energies into the course than into my wildlife photography.  It might take a back seat tomorrow as there is snow falling, and I’m not going to be able to resist that as far as photographing events outside goes!  Still, maybe I’ll even work a bird photo into the course somewhere, although I am trying not to revert to type too quickly!

I read through Michael Freeman’s ‘The Photographer’s Eye’ before I started the course, and over the last few days I have dipped back into it as far as the elements I have covered to date are concerned;  it makes at lot more sense to me now that I have physically done some of the things he discusses, especially around placement in the frame and depth and perspective.  As I go along, I’ll try and shoot a couple of sequences in a similar style to those used as examples in the book.  Rice farmers and salt panners are not that prevalent round here, but I’m sure the local area will have something to offer ..

I’ll even confess to moments of enlightenment .. as I’ve been looking round possible locations and considering ideas for later parts of the course I have actually started to see things in a different way – maybe I never looked before, and now that I have to be aware of opportunities for potential shots, I have actually started to spot elements of design, colour combinations, shapes, contrasts etc.  I really thought it would be difficult – after all, that’s ‘art’ isn’t it, and I don’t/can’t/won’t do art, but I seem to be spotting things all over the place.  Really surprised!

Blogging .. I’ve maintained a blog before, so the mechanics are familiar, although the more recent improvements to Blogger needed a little investigation.  The placement of photographs could do with being rather less random, as they do seem to move at will on occasions .. either that or I’ve missed something somewhere.  The ‘lightbox ’carousel option I like.

Missing opportunities to take shots for later elements of the course was something that concerned me, and there is no way I am going to remember all the requirements in the course folder.  So what I have done is scribble out a series of flow charts which give me a simple ‘one stop’ overview of what I’m supposed to be doing.  Here’s an example of the first part of the course running up to ‘Contrasts’ ..

So, overall a positive start on limited time.  Real work is not going to give me that many hours a week for the course, but I hope to keep up reasonable momentum and deliver the first assessment within a couple of months of setting out if I can.  I would certainly have liked to select some more ambitious subjects for the initial exercises, and hopefully as the days get longer, more options will start to open up for that.

Exercise 4 : The Frame : Shutter speeds

Exercise 4   :   Shutter speeds

The objective of this exercise was to use different shutter speeds and observe the shutter speeds at which  an object was 'frozen' or showed movement.  The camera was set on Tv mode – shutter priority – such that the aperture was adjusted with each change in shutter speed to maintain the same exposure.

The original plan was to visit a fountain in one of the local parks and photograph the water, but the –9C overnight temperature soon caused that to be cancelled !  I wanted to work with water, so the local River Blackwater was the next best thing – with only Saturdays to shoot, I felt I needed to get weaving with the exercises and maintain what has been a reasonable momentum with the course so far.

The stretch of river I had in mind has a spillway and small weir pool that gives water movement at two different speeds - the very fast, smooth movement down the spillway and the chaotic turbulence of the pool.  The camera was mounted on a tripod and a view down the spillway framed to fill most of the image.  Photographs were taken from 1/8000sec to 1/3sec and resultant images compared for movement of a) the fast and smooth water of the spillway and b) the slower white water of the pool.

The fastest shutter speeds of 1/8000sec down to 1/350sec gave very similar images, with no indication of movement in either fast or slow water.  Close examination of the fast water at 1/180sec (using 100% view on screen) showed the first signs of a blurring in the pattern of flow, but the turbulent, slower water, was still sharply focused.  At 1/90sec water at both speeds was blurred and I found this was the most pleasing image, giving a nice dynamic sense of the flow of the stream.  At 1/45, 1/20, 1/10, 1/6 and 1/3sec blurring increased proportionally and none of these shutter speeds gave a pleasing image – there was just too much movement.

It would have been nicer to select a more interesting subject for this exercise, but the weir pool served its purpose in less than ideal conditions.  I was surprised that the first signs of failure to freeze the movement occurred at 1/180sec as I had expected it happen at a faster shutter speed given the apparently rapid rate of water flow.  I plan to come back to this exercise at a later date and re-shoot a more colourful subject with a greater distance of travel.

Technical details:

Canon 5D Mk II with 24-105mm f/4 L IS lens

32mm       |     ISO400

Location for shoot

1/3000sec

1/1500sec

1/750sec

1/350sec

1/180sec

1/90sec - my preferred option

1/45sec

1/20sec

1/10sec

1/6sec

Exercise 3 : Focus at different apertures

As with the previous exercise, the idea here was still to use a row of objects but now the plan was to focus at a set point in the middle of the row and explore the impact of using different apertures on the depth of field attained.  I opted to use a row of paperback books for this exercise as the titles on the spines gave a ready way of identifying the area of acceptable focus, and I wanted to do something more colourful than the dominoes!

I shot the photographs at all full f stops between f/4 and f/22, but only f/4, f/11 and f/22 are shown here to demonstrate the effects observed.  The focus is on the spine of Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ as that was the story I wanted the images to tell, and the shutter speed at each aperture was noted to record the reciprocal relationship between them ..... as the aperture decreases, the shutter speed increases to maintain the same exposure.  Natural light was used, the camera held on a tripod and the shutter fired with a remote.

Shutter speeds for each aperture were:  f/4 at 1/15sec   :   f/8 at 0.5sec   :   f/22 at 2sec

The areas of acceptable focus are annotated on the images with white arrows.  The first image, taken at f/4, was only acceptably sharp immediately around the point of focus and told a different story to the images at smaller apertures.  The narrowest depth of field took the eye to the Douglas Adams' books and held it there – so the image seems to be about these books only.  The image at f/11 was soft at both ends of the row, and although still taking my eye to the middle, it had lost the emphasis on the Adams’ series.  At f/22 the image was just a picture of a row of books and lacked emphasis on any particular aspect, hence failing to emphasise the point of the image.

f/4

f/11

f/22

Technical details:

Canon 5D Mk II with 24-105mm f/4 L IS lens

80mm       |     ISO400

Exercise 2 : Focus with a set aperture

The next set of exercises is aimed at the subject of focus.  The objective of the first of these is to fix the lens at the widest aperture (f/4 in my case) and focus at three different places along a row of objects.  I shot this sequence several times, initially outdoors using trees, a fence and an old church wall and compared these images with shots set up indoors using rows of books or dominoes.  Although all four sets clearly exemplified the different focal points, I settled on the dominoes as demonstrating the effect best to be added to my learning journal for the purposes of the exercise.

The dominoes were placed on a black woven mat and the weave pattern is clearly visible in the images as the focal point was shifted along the row; this very obviously contributes to the definition of the area of focus.  The image where the focus was closest to the camera held my eye at the bottom of the image with little inclination to move upwards; I guess an image focused in this way could have utility in magazines where text could be at the top in the de-focused area, but it was not an image that held appeal for me.  The image where the focal point was in the centre of the row of dominoes, actually on the double six, lead my eye smoothly into the image, hit the key area of focus and then moved upwards following the gradual fall off in sharpness.  Where focus was at the top of the image, I’m not sure my eye was lead anywhere!

This was a good exercise to go through and I think its value was enhanced significantly by taking the opportunity to shoot different sets of images under different circumstances.  The outdoor sets still had the same visual impact on me, but as they were shot over greater lengths of objects, they lacked the clarity and impact of the dominoes.

Front focus

Centre focus

Rear focus

Technical details:

Canon 5D Mk II with 24-105mm f/4 L IS lens

105mm    |     f/4     |    1/45sec     |     ISO200

Introduction: Exercise 1

Focal length and angle of view

The first exercise involved using a zoom lens (in this case a Canon 24-105mm f/4 L IS) to match the size of the image in the viewfinder with the size of the image as seen with the (other!) naked eye.  The answer, read from the lens barrel, was about 54mm, so not far off from a ‘standard’ lens view, considered to be a nominal 50mm.  A single image was taken.

The lens was then set to its widest (24mm) and narrowest (105mm) angle of view and one further photograph taken at each setting.  The images were clearly smaller and larger than the ‘standard’ view respectively.

Prints of each of the three images (just inkjet copies on ordinary paper) were made and the ‘standard’ images held up to the eye whilst standing in the same location from where the pictures were taken, and a measurement made of the viewing distance; this was 47cm.  The print of the image taken at 24mm needed to be held much closer to make it appear the same size as the actual view .. far too close for my eyesight, but probably about 25cm or so!  The print made from the image taken at 105mm needed to be held much further away to match the size of the view, certainly more than arms length.

Although I have obviously looked at many scenes at different focal lengths before, this exercise was interesting because of the work with the actual prints to match the wide and narrow angle of view images with the ‘standard’ view.   I used a tree as a ready way of scaling the images by eye – not a very interesting tree, so I have not attached the actual images, especially as the impact of focal length crops up in more detail in ‘Part One : The Frame’ later on.

All images were taken at f/4 and 1/250sec at ISO200.

Spent some time today going through the course materials for the first time and organising where I'm going to make a start with the exercises in the Introductory module leading up to the non-assessed 'Contrasts' assignment.  I got hold of a copy of Michael's Freeman's "The Photographers Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos" and found it to be a great companion to the OCA course notes, building on a number of the key themes.

Of course, having decided what it is I want to do and thought about some likely local locations, I now need to get out there and shoot some photographs ...