Borrowed colour
Bring ‘found’ colour into a composition to make it a colourist image
Colourist thinking can solve problems in planned photography, or simply bring enhancement. Most planned photography is in the studio, where colouring parts of the set through lighting is a standard technique, such as adding a tungsten warmth to a daylight-balanced main light, or the popular teal-orange used in colour grading in movies (and making its way into stills shooting too). Those are calculated decisions, and useful enough, but more interesting and less predictable is what I call borrowing colour in an impromptu location shoot.
One of the most typical situations is searching for a setting and backdrop against which to arrange still-life subjects or a person. In a normal way, the setting would become a part of the image, but the colourist approach is to take from it just its colour, usually by throwing it far out of focus so that it becomes unrecognizable.
Just a swimming pool
The subject – an assignment, in fact – is a collection of bottles of Mauritian rum that are infused with local ingredients, including vanilla, lemon rind, chillies and cinnamon. While there are obviously many ways of treating a small collection like this,
backlighting helps the colours of the liquid glow. Nevertheless, neutral backlighting seemed a little plain and austere – the bottles themselves have no colour.
However, the traditional small bar where they were kept and served was right next to a swimming pool. By placing them on a ledge by the water, and keeping the depth of field shallow to blur the pool, I brought its attractive colour into the image.
Being on the opposite side of the colour circle from most of the rum colours, the aqua was complementary. The illustration shows where these hues fall on the colour circle. In the two wheels, saturation increases outward from a neutral centre, while brightness increases downward.