Chill the Mood with Cool Colors

Blue Monday, Blue Moon, blue mood, I got the blues--it seems that the color blue takes a lot of blame for people's less-than-sunny moods. I'm not so sure that blue is responsible for all the negative emotional connotations that it gets associated with, but it is true that any time that the primary palette of your photos falls into the cooler range (blues, greens, purples), the emotional atmosphere is chilled out a bit.

But cool blue and other cool colors are also considered calming colors, which is probably why so many people spend so much money to go to the Caribbean and stare at the blue sea for a week. The calming effect of blue is also the reason that interior decorators suggest painting your bedroom blue if you're looking for a peaceful retreat at the end of the day. (I guess if you're looking for passionate nights you should paint your room with hot colors.) And they say wearing a blue suit to a job interview is a good idea because blue is associated with loyalty and calmness.

Cool tones can also be a welcome visual relief on a sunny summer's day. Think about hiking up a hot steep hillside on a hot July afternoon and then refreshing yourself beside a cool blue mountain stream and resting on damp moss-covered rock. I took the photo here after a long hike on a warm summer day on the John Jay Homestead in Katonah, New York and, probably because I was tired and thirsty, was immediately attracted to the unusual blue color of the barn. I found the coolness of the blue paint and the green lawn a refreshing and welcome relief and, of course, responded to that bit of visual relief with my camera. Just looking at the scene in the viewfinder really did help chill me out a bit.

Film and television directors are masters of exploiting the secret power of color and mood and they play with our emotions like puppet masters as they shift the palette from the fiery emotional moods of reds/yellows/oranges to the somber blues/grays/greens of twilight. Next time that you're watching an action/adventure film, watch how the color palette shifts from the hot tones of the action scenes (Bruce Willis igniting the elevator shaft in Die Hard) to the cooler palette of more somber and ominous scenes (the boat Orca in Jaws drifting in the cool twilight as the shark plots its destruction).

All colors have rich and complex psychological interpretations and if you're aware of them when you're choosing your palette or searching for subjects, you can use them to manipulate or intensify the mood of your photos. The more of a particular color range you use in a scene--and the more you eliminate other colors--the more dominant and obvious the mood becomes. And don't be surprised if you come how with a card full of cool-tone subjects and someone asks why you're in such a blue mood!

Pump Up the Volume with Bold, Brash Colors

The other day I was driving through one of the local town beach parks, just cruising around hoping to see something that would entice me to take some pictures (or "cruising for snaps" as I like to call it), and was shocked and delighted to see that the old concrete bunker of a snack bar had been painted a wild Caribbean blue. Wow! What a color. We're not talking a pretty seaside blue or a gentle sky blue, but a downright radiant spin-your-head-around blue.

I knew I wanted to photograph the building but really wasn't sure what I wanted to say with the pictures. Should I shoot the entire building? I tried that and the shots were OK, but I wanted something slightly more abstract where the color would carry the shot. A corner of the building with the beach in the background? (Maybe--I'll show you that photo tomorrow.) Some detail? I was kind of lazy at first and took a few halfhearted snapshots, but the closer I got to the building and the more I began to study the details, the more intrigued I got.

This color was just screaming to be photographed and I was determined to find some detail or composition that really let it be the star of the shot. Then I saw this drinking fountain: perfect. Nice and shiny and polished and bold enough to stand up to the wall of blue. I shot about 50 different compositions, just tweaking the placement and playing with different ideas. Talk about fun! I shot the photo with my Nikon D90 and an 18-70mm Nikkor zoom, but could have easily shot it with any point-and-shoot camera. It was a simple, direct shot.

While I was shooting I got into a nice conversation with a woman whose son who owned the snack bar and she asked me what was attracting me to the shots I was taking. I told her it was the bright Caribbean blue walls (stunningly, she told me that it was the town public works department that chose the color) and she told me that she was Greek and that the colors (the building's trim is bright white) reminded her of the Greek Isles. How great that this ordinary little snack bar had been transformed into such an exotic space with just some paint. (I immediately wanted to go home and paint my house this color.)

Anyway, I shot a lot of different views and details of this building and will probably return to shoot more--it was that much fun. One of the things that I liked about finding such a wild and strong color was that it reminded me of some of photos of Pete Turner, my hero in color photography. Pete is the master of brash, wild colors and one of his photos of a yellow and red plastic garbage can on a beach has stayed in my head since I first saw it decades ago. Some photos affect you that strongly and plant themselves in your imagination.

Keep your eye and your imagination open for bold, wild colors because you never know where you'll find them and then work them until you find the perfect shot. Pete Turner found a classic shot in a garbage can at the beach and I found this great fountain shot at my local beach. The shots are there, just keep looking.

Design with Contrasting Colors

In yesterday's post I talked about visiting a steam-train depot in a rural part of Connecticut on a scouting trip. I was at the location trying to decide if I might want to put the steam train on my shoot list for an upcoming revision of my book The Joy of Digital Photography.

While I was poking around the depot I spotted a bright red caboose that no photographer could resist. Unfortunately, while the train car itself was very pretty (see photo below), it was sitting in a somewhat mundane setting with a lot of clutter around it and a blah white sky above it. No shot there.

But one thing that really caught my eye, however, was a series of bright yellow handrails (I think they were hand rails, anyway) contrasting against the shiny red paint of the caboose. Color contrasts make great design subjects because they startle the eye--causing our brains to ping back and forth from one color to the other. Often color contrasts work best when you have a hot color (a red rose) against a cool background (green foliage), but as you can see, even colors that are close to each other on the spectrum, such as yellow and red, can be equally exciting.

All that you really have to do to make color contrasts work is to isolate them--crop away (in the viewfinder) anything that detracts from the intensity of the contrast. In this case I was lucky, the yellow handrails were more or less surrounded by bright red paint, but I still cropped the shot in such a way that the yellow line ran the length of the frame, intensifying the contrast. And again, I was lucky that the line had such a nice natural curl and that there was a strong vertical line of rivets alongside it.
Incidentally, I think this is the beauty of informal scouting trips to new places--you never know what you'll find. While I went looking for photos of trains, I came back with a really cool abstract I could never have envisioned before starting out.