Cast colourful shadows

James Paterson splits shadows into bold colours with a clever lighting trick and teaches the fundamentals of colour theory

Split shadows into bold colours in the studio

The coloured shadow look we see here is an old-school technique that you’re just as likely to see in a science museum as a photo, but is becoming increasingly popular as photographers explore optical in-camera effects. And as well as a vibrant way to shoot a portrait it’s also a fascinating demo of colour theory at play.

To split our shadows into different colours we need three separate light sources coloured red, green and blue. When working in combination – as we see in the light hitting the subject here – the three colours form normal white light. This is down to the concept of additive colour mixing, where red, green and blue light combine to form white. But when our three lights are spaced apart something very interesting happens to the shadows.

Each light will create its own shadow, just as any normal light would. But the shadows take on different colours, and they’re not necessarily the colours we started with.

Each shadow blocks one of the three colours, so what’s left is a mixture of the other two shades. The results are secondary colours – the red and blue combine to create magenta, red and green make yellow, and blue and green equals cyan. If your subject is close to the backdrop, you may see touches of red, green and blue in the shadows at points where the subject blocks two of the lights at once. It’s a great fun way to explore colour mixing! Let’s get started…