Make Your Subject Pop with a Vibrant Color

Brilliant colors are great at drawing attention to your main subject. The day I photographed this little girl on Liberty Island (looking toward the New York skyline) a few dozen people stopped to peer through the viewer and while the shots were kind of interesting, nothing was really jazzing me very much. Then out of the blue this little girl in the neon pink dress stepped up and I couldn't shoot fast enough--the color made a great contrast to the muddy waters of the Hudson River behind her. It was the same shot I'd been looking at for quite a few minutes with other people, but it was her dress that made the shot. Any time you can include a vibrantly colored main subject you'll get people's attention. The human brain is naturally drawn to and curious about bright colors and it's hard for anyone looking at a shot like this to not pause and look further.

Bring Home the Color Palette of Other Places

One of the first things that I notice when I travel someplace new is that each place seems to have its own unique palette of colors, sometimes natural, sometimes man made, that permeates almost every view. In Bermuda, for example, all of the houses are painted in soft pastel shades and the entire countryside seems to be awash in a rainbow of pastel hues--even the stores in the commercial district along Front Street in Hamilton are painted in delicate pastel colors. It's hard to walk around Bermuda and not feel like you're in a giant artist's studio. In the Loire Valley in France, I was taken by how many shades of green there are in the landscape, and in the American Southwest (particularly parts of Utah and Arizona) the landscape seems to ooze with deep reds and gold--the dust that you bring back to your motel room on your clothes spreads those colors over everything you touch. (When my girlfriend wanted to add some red to one of her sketches of Utah, she literally took some of the red dirt and mixed it with water and painted it into her sketch.)

Bringing home photos that capture the colors of a place goes a long way to making your photos more authentic and in conjuring what I call the "color spirit" of a place. While traveling near the Mexican border in Tubac, Arizona, for example, we walked among dozens of stores selling brilliantly-painted Mexican pottery and the entire town seemed to vibrate with intense reds, greens, yellows and blues. I tried for quite a while to compose a wider scene that reflected that festive palette but none of my shots seemed to capture it. Instead, I started taking close-up photos of individual pots and pieces of artwork and I ended up taking dozens of photos of hand-painted pots, pitchers, tin lizards, etc. The shot here is just a detail of one of those pots but for me it recalls all of the fun and cheerfulness of those colorful displays.

Wherever you travel, look for colors that represent the mood and the feel of the place and then look for ways to capture that palette in your photos. Look for a mix of wide views, shots of people in costumes or local clothing styles and close-ups of art work and crafts. The more different objects and settings that you shoot that show those colors the more your photos will capture the color spirit of that place.

Create a Blue Flamingo

Imagine--a blue flamingo! Everyone loves fantasy, I think, and nothing conjures more romance or imagination than the idea of a totally new species of animal. Unfortunately, this bird is pure fantasy and I created it (from a shot of a pink flamingo, of course) in Photoshop. The first time I put a version of this shot on Flickr, however, two interesting things happened: For one, it got the highest number of views of any image I had on the site. But also, the photo got ripped off faster than you can possibly believe--I found it on blogs, websites, ezines and even on the cover of an online menu for a restaurant. (I didn't have to sue anyone, by the way, but I did go after every single abuse.)

Creating this wonderful bird was a lot easier than you might think and it was all done with the hue/saturation tool in Photoshop (Elements has the same tool). Here's how to do it:

• First, choose a subject with a bold overall color. The flamingo worked well because it was just various shades of pink (even the legs are pink) and white.
• At the top of the hue/saturation window, look for the pull down menu that says "Master." Under that you'll find a list of all the colors. Choose the color that matches your subject (in this case, I selected red). If you were doing this with a lemon, for example, you would choose yellow.
  
• At the bottom of the hue/saturation window you'll notice there is an eyedropper tool with three boxes: the eyedroper, the eyedropper with a "+" symbol and the eyedropper with a "-" symbol.
  
• Select just the eyedropper and click anywhere in your subject. That tells the tool what color you want to change. Now select the eyedropper+ box and then click as many times as you like to pick up more shades of your chosen color (I probably made about 12 different clicks within the flamingo to pick up various shades of red and pink).
• Now adjust the hue slider and watch what happens. The color of your main subject (a flamingo, a lemon, etc.) will begin to shift colors radically. Interestingly, because you chose a specific color from the drop down menu, only that color will shift. The remaining portions of your photo will remain the same. So if you were doing a lemon on a blue background and had selected yellow and sampled just yellow areas, only the yellow would change hue. The blue background would remain exactly as it was.

After I changed the flamingo from pink to blue, I did some touching up (darkening selected areas of the background, healing some tiny flaws in the water, etc.) and then did an overall curves adjustment. You'll notice there is still a tinge of pink in the flamingo and I could have gotten rid of that by going more extreme with the hue shift, but I kind of liked the pinkish color coming through a bit. This is a really simple Photoshop trick and in the next tip I'll show you another application of it--turning a sunset into a moonset. Stay tuned!

Photographing Autumn Colors: Make Hay (or Autumn Pictures) While the Sun Shines

Autumn is probably my favorite time of year. I just love the smell of woodsmoke in the air, seeing pumpkins on everyone's front steps, the sweet taste of fresh-made cider--and getting another chance to photograph those amazing autumn leaves. Of all the surprises that Mother Nature has to offer photographers, few are more fascinating to watch than seeing thousands of trees and millions of leaves burst into intense shades of yellow, orange and red. If you've never seen the height autumn's glory in New England, it's a sight to behold.

In New England everyone talks about the "peak" of color as if it were some type of mystical moment--and in some ways it is. While some autumns are better than others, in each season there seems to be a short window of a few days (some Vermonters will tell you it's a few hours) when the leaves are so intensely colored you'd think they're going to just burst and start squirting colorful pigments all over the landscape--the colors are that brilliant. The colors are so outlandish, in fact, that they seem to shine even on the darkest nights.

When the colors get to this state, however, you have to have your camera ready and be prepared to drop what you're doing and start shooting. I saw the tree here while on my way to a dentist appointment and the afternoon light was just starting to illuminate the leaves. I actually thought of blowing-off the appointment to photograph the tree, but decided I had some time before the light was perfect. Thankfully it was a short appointment and so I was able to run home after, grab my camera and get back to the tree just as the last rays of late afternoon light were igniting the treetop. I shot for about 15 minutes, taking a variety of views of this tree and some others nearby and then the sun faded and the magic was gone. The tree was still beautiful to look at, but the illumination was over for the day.

Whether it's the true peak or not, when you see a spectacular tree like this, you have to make an effort to photograph it because, as so often happens in life, the beauty fades quickly. Today there is a driving rain outside and I'm sure that a lot of the leaves in that tree are laying on the ground. That doesn't mean they still wouldn't make a nice photo--leaves in a pile make a great shot--but that moment of the tree just ignited with autumn color, with every leaf in place, is almost certainly over until next year. How glad I am that I made the effort to shoot it.

In the next tip I'll give you some ideas of what kinds of subjects to shoot and some technical tips for getting the best colors.

Design with a Limited Color Palette

The world around us, both man-made and natural, provides a kaleidoscope of colors, but often photographs are stronger when you limit that palette to just a few select colors. The reason is simple: the fewer colors that you include in a shot the more bold and prominent those colors become. In the shot of the lobster floats show here (I shot them next to a pickup truck in Stonington, Maine), by isolating the pattern so that you see just the two main colors, the pattern jumps right out at you--the contrast of just two colors strengthens the pattern of the repeating shapes. Had I included some of the red color of the truck or the yellow house behind it, your eye would start to wander from color to color instead of concentrating on the pattern of green and white.

You can apply the idea of a limited palette to a lot of subjects. In flower shots for example, a row of pink tulips will look stronger when isolated against a plain green lawn than against other colorful flowers. Or, if you're photographing a row of brightly painted blue and red rowboats on a Caribbean beach, isolating them from their surroundings (and other colors) will really make the colors pop.

Interestingly, the combination of colors that you use when you select a limited palette will have a profound effect on how each of the colors is perceived. Photograph a single green leaf against a sheet of black construction paper and the color of the leaf will "advance" forward, nearly leaping off the background; but shoot the same leaf against a red background and the two colors will "vibrate" against one another, competing for your attention. I've been doing some experimenting with color contrasts lately and will publish some of them in future postings.

Pump up the Colors with Hue and Saturation

One of the first tools that people gravitate toward when they first use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements is the Hue and Saturation tool. It's a very simple tool to use (you just play with sliders to adjust both hue and color saturation) and you can create some dazzling effects. The availability of a saturation tool has created a world of over-saturated photos in online galleries and photo-sharing sites and while they're fun to look at you should be aware those colors don't always print quite so vividly.

Still, there are times when you might want to oversaturate colors just for the heck of it--especially for online use--and that's exactly what I did with this shot of an oil slick (photographed in a motel parking lot on a rainy day). The image came out of the camera far more dull than I had hoped (or than it looked in real life) so I started to pump up the saturation--a little at first and then a lot! The version here is actually only a moderately saturated version, I also have what I call a Peter Max version that is even more intense.

Most image-editing programs have a saturation control and, as I said, all that you have to do is call up the image, open the tool and then start saturating. You can also saturate invidual colors (or parts of an image) and I'll talk about doing both of those things in future postings. For now, call up and image that you think is too dull and pump up the volume!

Isolate Color Contrasts

Bright, contrasting colors are very effective at getting people's attention in a photograph because the eye is naturally curious about the interaction of colors. Nature is full of color contrasts and all you have to do is flip through a flower seed catalog to see some of the wild combinations that exist. But you can also find a lot of strong contrasting colors in man-made objects. I spotted this yellow and blue color contrast on a dock on Cape Cod from a few hundred feet away and was so curious about what the colors were that I walked out to see what the subject was--and I was glad I did. I thought the hose and the sprayer were such an interesting combination that I spent about 20 minutes shooting various compositions.

The key to capturing strong color contrasts is to isolate them from their surroundings: all that you want to show is the contrast in colors. It really doesn't matter if the subject is "real" (like this one) or more abstract, like drips of paint on a Caribbean wall, the interaction of the colors will carry the photo if you compose tightly enough. Finding color contrasts is a good self assignment, so if you're bored some Saturday afternoon, take a walk around and see what you can find.