civilized ku # 2024 ~ blue # 1
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 02:28PM ;)
Early evening light ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenThe color blue and, by association, the color cyan are not often prominently on display in my pictures. IMO, the reason for this bias is threefold: 1) blue/cyan or most shades thereof are near the bottom of my list, favorite color wise - no blue/cyan cars, no blue/cyan paint in/on my house, little in the way of blue/cyan clothing, etc., 2) my eye is not attracted to blue referents, picture making wise, and, 3) I don't live in an environment where blue/cyan colors are very dominant as they are, say, in Markus Spring's series, Couleurs Du Maghreb (1-8).
When it comes to picture making, I don't consciously avoid blue/cyan colors (as I most emphatically do in my selection of material goods) and, although there may be a bit of subconscious avoidance, those colors can be found in some of my pictures. However, blue/cyan colors are, as mentioned, rarely featured and, equally rare, are seldom causal, picture making motivation wise.
That said, over the past week or so, I have, in fact, been responding to blue/cyan colors - the beginning of my blue period? - as a primary reason for making a few pictures. I can not explain the rather sudden awareness to these colors. Perhaps it is simply because I don't live in an environment where blue/cyan colors are very dominant - oceans, blue skies stretching to a distant horizon, and the like - so, when blue/cyan colors strike my eye and tickle my sensibilities as they recently have done, I just can not avoid making pictures which are instigated by seeing those colors in a stand-out-of-the-crowd kind of way..
In the Early evening light picture in this entry, the blue reflection on the car, together with the subtle but very measurable blue/cyan on the house across the street and in the clouds, as contrasted against the warm light cast by a street light / Xmas lights / Xmas tree were what caught my eye ...
... however, as I am not a color screamist, in processing the picture I did remove quite a bit of blue from the clouds. As is most often the case with sky/clouds when pictured at night, the clouds were recorded as hyper-saturated blue in appearance - a level of saturation well beyond how they appear to the eye. Consequently, whenever any of my pictures include the night sky, I always de-saturate the way-over-the-top blue.
In this picture, I also de-saturated the blue/cyan in the car sky reflection and the houses across the street. In all cases, the amount of de-saturation was based upon what looked "natural" to the eye yet to a level which would still evidence the cool/warm color contrast which motivated my picture making response to the scene.
FYI, while the following 2 entries quite obviously are part of my nascent blue period, it should be noted that blue/cyan colors are also quite prominent in the Whiteface from Monument Falls picture found in the entry ku # 1136 ~ out of sight / out of mind (the entry immediately following the blue pictures). That picture was made within the time frame of the makings of blue # 1-3. Although, in fact, those colors were not a conscious picture making factor in the Whiteface from Monument Falls picture.
Perhaps my subconscious mind is telling my eyes to atone for their blue/cyan sins of omission.
Reader Comments (1)
I don't share your exact feelings about blue/cyan, but I do have a problem with cyan that finds me moving the sliders in HSL when I'm editing in Lightroom. Usually I find myself reducing the cyan hue and thus increasing the blue, sometimes even lowering the blue luminance a tad too. I tend to work to what looks good to my mind's eye, rather than by some rule that tries to mimic real life (whatever that is). I've never been quite sure whether the particular camera sensors I use boost cyan somewhat and that it then looks unrealistic/unpleasing to my eye on a print, or whether it's just a preference of my own. Recently, I've been aware of experiencing a little difficulty with fine tuning the white balance too; I might like the blueness of say a winter's light, but a print just looks more pleasing if I increase the colour temperature a bit. I don't get hung up on precision in this editing exercise, but prefer to just work by intuition i.e. does it please me.