Epiphany

I haven’t blogged much lately.  I’ve spent the last few months working on the new (old) house.  However, I recently had an epiphany about one of the major attractions for me in a photograph that I hadn’t really realised was such an influence on my style until recently…..so I thought I’d blog about it!  In my previous post I talked about a recent exhibition where I was drawn to the shots with limited colour palettes.  This got me thinking and I started looking back at some of my favourite photographers/images from the past and indeed my favourite shots that I have taken.  Interestingly the limited colour palette comes up again and again.  Work by Ernst Haas and Saul Leiter are both examples of this;

The top two images here are Saul Leiter and the bottom two are Ernst Haas.

In my last post I  singled out Mark Power and Peter Marlow’s work in ‘Open for Business’ and these shots also have limited colour palettes and even in my own work I seem to lean toward this almost subconsciously.  The next two shots I took a while back mainly for their subject and form but the limited palette must have also registered with me and I have countless examples of this.  I studied colour under various ‘OCA’ modules but it’s another thing to realise the extent to which it impacts on your own work.  It has less to do with combinations of colours and whether they are complimentary or not but more on the range of colour in an image.  It’s not a hard and fast rule but a definite tendency and influence.

        

This goes further with the complete tone of an image and this seems to come mostly from film; what I can only describe as ‘the Kodachrome look’.  Photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston have produce these kind of images that have a whole atmosphere created by the overall tone.  This seems to be created using a combination of time of day and film stock.

I think I’ll be keeping an eye out in future to see how I use colour in the way that I do (rather subconsciously) and I intend to make this far more conscious in future.