Sep 212011
{click image to view large}
This was a challenging image to process, with respect to color. When I tried to eliminate color casts—using every trick I know—it looked, somehow…wrong. Too, nature doesn’t always conform to our rules of color harmony. 🙂
Now I’ve reset my camera to shoot RAW+JPEG, so I’ll have a color reference. The JPEG preview on my camera display looked accurate in the field but, working solely with the RAW file next day, it was hard to recall from memory.
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Nikon D300; f8 @ 1/180 sec, ISO 720 (handheld);
18.0-200.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 22mm (33mm EFL)
This is precisely why Craig advises to always shoot RAW + JPEG. Because it’s hard to recall what we saw – all the nuances – the next day.
I tried to set RAW + JPEG with my Fuji X100 – as it does have that provision in its menu. But I ended up with just RAW! Oh well, its RAW captures are so incredible that I decided I didn’t really need the JPEG, too.
April, I love all the nuances of colors in this finished image. It’s always amazing to me when I see the upper level purples partially obscured by the lower level oranges. Yet the purples still retain their character. You got this quite well here.
Purple plus orange really ought to be gray. But you have them blended into a very “alive” effect.
You have a good eye for color, Flo.
My mind kept saying the sky should be blue, but every sample I took said, “No, it’s purple.” 🙂
One thing I learned when studying graphic design was that we don’t have color memory. Maybe that also ties into what Craig says about our brain constantly white-balancing a scene.
We say “cameras lie”, but so does our mind’s eye!
Unless it can be retrained…
April wrote: “We say ‘cameras lie’, but so does our mind’s eye!”
This is esp true of those who have various degrees of color-blindness. And then, there’s really no such thing as “color”! There’s what we “see” as our brains interpret a very narrow range in the over-all vibrational frequencies that reach the surface of our planet. And we choose to call this sensation, seeing “color” – talk about the lies we’d have ourselves believe, lol.
Craig seems to have a very sharp color-differentiation skill, which he’s spent years fine-tuning. It is thanks to him that I’ve begun to see over-all color shifts in images.
But as far as having so-called color memory, I wonder whether anyone truly has perfect color recall – as some musicians seem to have “perfect pitch”?
April,
I comment your new pics on Flicker.
Iam sure you will appreciate the photos of this woman on Flicker
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eberg/6060502883/in/photostream/
I took pleasure in this above discussion and love this flaming sky.
Thank you, Micheline, for all your recent comments on Flickr. I always appreciate your thoughtful insights.
Also for the link to Evelyn Berg’s work! Vibrant, bold, full of life; often geometric, but with such a feeling of movement.
Micheline, thanks for that link. I did review several of this gal’s images. I love her blurs, abstracts and macros. But since she has well over 1000 images posted, it’s too big to go through.
I love the colors. I love what they do to me, when I just enjoy them. They will be acting different every day on me, resonating with my inner values and therefore change with me.
So I wonder why anyone would be eager to have them “as they were that day”. The world changes so fast, you could snap thousands of pictures in a minute and every single one would be different.
Isn’t a picture always just a jump pad for us to go to inner journeys? And this one is a very beautiful jump pad. Thank you for that. 🙂
cheers
®
A question which made me stop to contemplate… 🙂
Perhaps not to freeze the moment, but as practice or discipline to reflect what was actually seen instead of what was thought or imagined.
Or, is it a way to connect so there are no boundaries between “inner” and “outer”?
I’ll come back to add a word about the discussion. I promise.
Images as jump pads for inner journeys – I love this concept. I was aware of this, subliminally/subconsciously – but thanks for helping me to bring this up into my conscious mind, Roland!