Photography for International Award at DBGS
Colour
This is a big topic and so we will just cover three ideas.
Colour and the digital camera
Take three photographs of one of your friends. Just quick snapshots wil be fine, but make sure you turn your flash off. Take one snap outside, one under flourescent lights and one by the light of a lamp that uses incandescent lightbulbs. Now turn your flash on and take another photo. Load them onto your computer and compare the images. Chances are that the colours all look very different. Why? Because the colour of the light falling on the subject was different in each case.
Your eyes are very good at deciding what colours things are. If you look at a white piece of paper outside in the sunshine, or under electric lights, it will appear to be the same colour - white. To a camera though, white might look red or green under electric light.
If you are not careful your photographs will have wiered colour casts if you shoot under flourescent or incandescent lights. You can correct that by using the White Balance controls on your camera. Read the manual to find out how.
Some cameras let you set Custom White Balance - and if yours does, you should learn how to use it - it will help you to get great colour photographs in the poorest of light.
Some cameras are better than others at setting white balance automatically. Generally, if you are shooting under artificial light, you are better setting the white balance manually.
There is an advanced article on White Balance here.
Colour and printing
Try printing one of your photographs on your colour printer at home. Do the colours look like those on your camera's screen or like the ones on your computer? If you are lucky, they will. Very often the colours will look very different and may well be completely unacceptable. This probably isn't because there is something wrong with your camera, computer or printer. It is more likely because each of these devices displays or sees colours differently.
Serious photographers, digital artists and designers need colour to reproduce accurately across different devices. In other words, if they have taken a great colour photograph, they want it to look good on screen and in print. They do this by using something called colour management. There is an advanced article about it here.
If you have a fairly good camera, printer and new computer, you may find that the colours you are getting are OK, but show some of your work to your friends, both in print and on their computers and see what they think.
One of the most frustrating things about digital photography is to spend hours editing your work, only to find that it looks awful when printed or seen on the web.
If you want to learn more about colour management - a very important topic in digital photography, talk to your teacher.
Using colour in photography: assignment
Some photographer use colour very skillfully. Take a look at the work of Raghu Rai and Raghubir Singh
Try and take a series of photographs where you really consider the use of colour - where the colours in the image really make it work. Post your best images on the Flikr group.
Other links to explore
http://www.worldpressphoto.org/
