What you stairing at?

Alistair Campbell finds adventurous colour combos in the mundane

Uless you live in a mouth-watering metropolis like New York or Bangkok, or in a creative city such as Copenhagen and Havana, chances are you might find your local streets feel full to the brim with grey concrete or beige bricks. You could be right, but even within these surroundings, you can challenge yourself to find colours and beauty.

Once you start to seek out specific colours or combinations of colours, they will appear everywhere. Doors, windows, security shutters, fences and railings all tend to be handpainted to a specific colour. The trick is not to go out searching for the perfect composition using Fibonacci’s golden ratio, but to see only colour, and free yourself from other rules or constraints.

The stairs to the top of this car park will not win me first prize at the next photo competition ceremony, but what I did see was a pleasing combination of blue and green hues.

Forget the rules

We’re all guilty of learning so many rules within photography and sticking to them so rigorously that it can actually spoil our photos. Look at the lamppost in this shot: it’s not even straight. But this is not an exercise in whether you can hold a camera straight or not: we all know we can do that if required. Free yourself up instead.

Colour harmonies

Opposite colours on the colour wheel usually work perfectly together, but occasionally others will mix well, too. If you ignore the beige of the bricks, all you are left with here are hues of green, blue and aqua. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest wearing green trousers with a blue top, but here they sit well together.

Lens choice

Nine times out of ten, when I’m heading out to shoot some street photography I’ll take a lens that gives me a little wiggle room. I usually take a 16-55mm f/2.8, but rarely use it much past 35mm. This was shot as wide as possible at 16mm, but it was great to have the option to get closer should I have wished to.