Lesson two: Seeing Color Contrast

Now this is where it gets interesting, where you get your inspiration, where now that you know what you’re looking for your images look better than everyone else. I like to use the above image as an example as its the first time I got a big lesson in seeing color temperature. I ask Carrie to give me two minutes before she went to the ceremony cause there was this couch right there at the church! She was ready to go and the bridesmaids were standing around and gawking at her beauty. So I recruited them to work for me, I had one crouch down behind the couch and hold a light into her veil. The other bridesmaid was standing at normal height next to me holding the flash at sholder level pointing directly at the bride – head zoomed. I set my exposure to underexpose the ambient by 1-2 stop and fired the flashes with the ST-E2 transmitter. I don’t remember now if I was just in too much of a rush to get my flash gelled or what, but I shot raw so I figured I could just color correct it later. When I got to the raw file and started working I was intrigued more by bringing out the differences in color than correcting the color to be uniform. There is a relatively intricate series of masked correction layers to push the different objects in the right color direction.

It wasn’t until just this year (2006) that I learned the technical reason that accentuating the differeing colors is a highly effective image enhancing efffect. The topic is way too broad to delve into completely here but it is explained in detail in Photoshop Lab Color, that’s why you’d take my lighting or photoshop course.

But let me get back to how you can do it on the spot.

I got a Bogen Cine sample pack from my local distributor. Its a swatchbook of all their filters. So besides CTO there’s 1/2 1/4 & 1/8 CTO, then there are the greens and blues and etc etc. They are sized about the size of the flash head. So what I did was take the filters out of the swatchbook, then stuck them in-between a self laminating card I got at office max (to give it more durability. I then carry a pocket full of these little gels and match them to my light source by approximation on the LCD. You can see the technique strewn through my wedding photojournalism galleries on indoor shots.

How to overpower daylight and use color contrast

This quick portrait of a bride was shot under a lemon tree in the bright desert afternoon sun of Palm Springs CA. In order to achieve a more dramatic contrast for the yellow of her flowers and the lemons hanging above her head I used the same Roscoe 3441 Straw gels I use for converting my flash heads to tungsten light, while shooting in open sunshine. The Contrasting light sources gave a dramatic separation of the colors due to the contrasting color temperatures of the light sources.

For some reason I favor this technique in the desert – mostly because it allows me to achieve the third principle ‘compose the unexpected’. Shown below is what the overall scene looked like in the Scottsdale desert with overcast skies.

The shoot with Myryka bellydancing was put together last minute while I was traveling in Phoenix so I didn’t have a lot of fancy gear or anything that wouldn’t fit in my standard camerabag. The light created in these shots came from two Canon 550 shoe mount strobes – one on camera and one in my left hand as I am accustomed to using at wedding receptions. To set my exposure I used program mode with an exposure compensation of -2 and a flash exposure compensation of +2 to get an extreme level of contrast between the dancer and the background.