Color and Typology

The last blog we discussed some pretty typical reasons for shooting in color as opposed to black and white. The first area we discussed was images where color was the primary subject discussed in the image. Usually such an approach is very formalistic and non conceptual, but that is not always the case as we shall see in the gridded sequence of images above. If any of the images in the grid above were to be viewed individually, we would in fact be stuck inside that formalistic universe, not only based on color, but the minimalistic composition which persists across every image in the cluster of images above. To be clear, every single image in the cluster has the exact same composition, focus, point of view and depth of field. There are no accidents here, everything is intentional. This is only one of many possible strategies for studying tonal change and variation related to time of day, seasons, weather, and environmental conditions; in this case the tonality of my acutely angular kitchen walls from dawn until dusk.

So how did this come to be?

Well a few years ago, I replaced the dingy off white color of my kitchen with a pale pale yellow tone, called Faded Straw. You just have to love the names the paint designers come up with for house paints. At any rate, it quickly became clear to me that this specific color shifted tonality very strongly with even the most minor changes of weather, and time of day. I would lie in bed at dawn and just marvel at how quickly the walls shifted tonalities. I suspect this is due to both its soft warmth, but also how light and reflective it is. So I began to work on a couple of differing color comparisons based mostly upon time of day, but also weather, and atmospheric conditions. The grid above is from a very sunny cloudless autumn day after a rain, where clouds move back in towards sunset.. The key to these type of comparisons is uniformity in terms of time, and composition. In the case of the grid above, a photo was taken every fifteen minutes from dawn until the beginnings of dusk. Commonly, I do the grids on days when I either need to proof a shoot, or I am grading exams or final projects for my classes. Both the grid above and the grid below have been edited to give you the gist of the shifts associated with these strange angular walls in my kitchen.

Above is a cluster of images that give the essence of how the walls behave tonally across a typical sunny day in late autumn. These photos were taken this past week. Please note, at no point in this process do I in any way adjust for saturation, color temperature, or contrast. What we see in the first two photos is an extended mid morning to mid afternoon period, where the lower quadrant of the right wall is the close to actual color with a slight blue shift coming from the indirect east lighting off the sky. As late afternoon approaches, the tone begins to shift to a tone warmer, and more orange, than the actual pale yellow, However, the contrast also increases as the west light starts to overwhelm the east light which is now total shade. At 5PM, the west light strongly overwhelms the eastern shadow light, and the right wall has shifted strongly into the orange with greater contrast, and by 5:30 PM dusk is descending, and the light has become so blue that any sense of the yellow disappears, leaving us with two different values of a sort of plum tone.

This was just the beginning of what this type approach allows us to begin the think about. Initially when I first started doing these, I was just tracking the sunny autumn days, and differences between days were there, but not that substantial. Most variation as expected was transitioning in and out of darkness into the daytime. However with the coming of winter rains, variability in tonality, saturation, and contrast, never seen in November became common. The strangest thing was the variation in the Faded Straw on days when storms gave way to mixed clouds, and depending on the thickness of cloud cover, the color of the walls could change within seconds. At this point, I have so many grids that I have begun to compare the same day a year apart, and times of day over a coarse of weeks. What I really learned from all this is that an initial color is no more than a tonal center, similar to a ringing note in a song around which it stretches and compresses and reinforces at will.