Color

I awoke in San Francisco and the last thing I wanted to do was get up and make photographs. I had a meeting in a few hours and I wanted to indulge myself and sleep in. I usually wake up at 5:30 a.m. each morning, and the idea of hugging the pillow for another hour or two was tempting. However, when I caught sight of the light coming through the hotel room window, I roused myself out of bed. As much as I would have loved a few more hours of sleep, I felt I had take advantage of a beautiful morning in San Francisco.

We were a few blocks from Union Square. I walked through the park and adjoining streets, observing how the light illuminated the architecture and the cable cars as they moved up and down Powell Street. Artists and craftspeople were setting up their stands in the square while dozens of other people made their way to work. The sky was clear, the air was crisp, and I took great pleasure in exploring.

However, I was not making great pictures. They were serviceable images, made more out of instinct than inspired by moments of discovery. After some time, I decided to head back to the hotel so that I would not miss my appointment.

As I walked, I saw light hitting a street corner, the location of a construction site. The light revealed an explosion of color made up of a temporary yellow wall, a red call box, and orange detour signs. I immediately realized that I might be late for my appointment.

I crossed the street and positioned myself at the very edge of the curb to evaluate the scene in front of me. I considered all the elements I had seen, including an orange cone and the ornate light post. But as I looked at the initial image I made, I knew the shot was missing something. I needed a human element to complete the composition.

I looked up and down the street, but there were few pedestrians this early in the morning. The people I did see were not walking past the spot where I wanted them for my composition. I saw a few people start to walk in my direction, but they eventually turned and moved on elsewhere.

I waited and waited, repeatedly looking at my watch as the minutes ticked by. When 15–20 minutes had passed, I realized I might be pushing my luck with time. I needed time to shower, get dressed, and drive across town. I kept calculating how quickly I could do those things and still arrive on schedule.

Just a few more minutes, I kept convincing myself. Just wait.

I had faced countless moments just like this in the past, and admittedly some of them had been a wash. The right character, the telling gesture, that special moment never arrived. But I did not allow such moments to dissuade me from staying where I was, because despite those failures, there had been moments when everything fell into place and magic happened. This scene was so close to perfection and I just had to trust that it would be worth the wait and the risk of being late.

I caught sight of an older man in the distance moving toward me. As he continued walking, I said a silent prayer, hoping he would walk past me. When I saw that he was, I raised the camera to my eye, framed the scene as I had previously determined, and depressed the shutter-release button just as he entered the right area of the scene.

I played back the image on the camera’s LCD and after being satisfied that I had gotten the shot, rushed back to my hotel room to prepare for my appointment. As I rode the elevator, I looked at the image and saw that the universe had provided me with the perfect character to complete the photograph. Not only had he been walking in the right direction, but the beautiful color of the scene now included the powder blue glove he wore on his right hand. The color was a wonderful contrast to the warm tones that had surrounded the man.

Just as brightness and contrast and line and shape are visual draws for the human eye, so is color. Saturated colors like the reds and yellows in the photograph that begins this chapter draw you into the photograph and give the image its vibrancy and energy.

We are visually drawn to colors, and these same colors can influence us psychologically, evoking moods and feelings. Reds and oranges evoke excitement, sensuality, and anxiety, whereas blues are associated with melancholy, sadness, or isolation. Juxtapose certain colors against each other, and a scene can explode with visual tension and energy, even though the subjects are static.

These same colors can also be distractions if they are possessed by secondary elements in the scene. If the background includes a woman in a red dress, the eye is drawn to that part of the frame and may compete with your subject for the viewer’s attention. It is important to consider how colors within the scene contribute to or detract from your subject. If colors in the background prove distracting, you will need to find a way to eliminate them, which could be as simple as shifting your camera position.

Color by Feel

There is certainly a science to color theory, of which I have a basic knowledge. But rather than becoming fluent in the logic of complex color theory, I have instead relied on my own gut reactions to colors as a graphic element in a photograph. There are times when I am walking down the street and I see a red door or the juxtaposition of a green wall against a blue sky and I am inspired to make a photograph. The trigger serves as the beginning of my process of evaluating the scene and breaking it down to its basic elements of light and shadow, shape and line, color, and gesture.

For the image on the following page, made in Chinatown, I was drawn to the various hues of red that dominated the scene. The ground and the Chinese lanterns were a saturated crimson, while the wall itself was a more muted version of the color. As I evaluated the scene, I noticed the yellow tails falling from the lanterns as well as the dark color of a lone bench.

I maneuvered myself to include each of these elements in the frame, but at this point, I primarily considered the lines and shapes that pervaded the space in front of me. In order for these various elements to play off of each other, I focused on the lines and shapes to build a balanced composition, where the result was not heavily weighted for the right or left, top or bottom.

As a result, the final image used color, but it was not a photograph solely about color. It was successful because of the use of light, shape, and line that helped me to build the composition.

Color as a Starting Point

I see color as a starting point and not an end in itself. Trying to create an image that is solely about color is like trying to compose music with a single note. A successful and interesting photograph has to be more than just a punchy hue. If it isn’t, it may inspire a cursory glance, but it is unlikely to hold the viewer’s attention for very long.

Just as I am often drawn into a scene because of light and shadow and the resulting contrast, I can find myself drawn into a scene because of color. However, I make a mistake if my seeing stops there. Instead, I use color as the beginning of an exploration where I build a composition that is complex, pleasing, and occasionally challenging.

I was walking in Downtown Los Angeles when I saw a powder blue wall with two whitish rectangles of paint (page 103). I also noticed the red curb. Luckily, the street had been changed so that I could safely stand several feet away from the curb and still include the wall, a bike rack, and a light post in the composition.

I made a series of images evaluating the relationship of each of these objects within the frame. I made adjustments to my standing position to ensure I had enough space at the top and left sides of the frame to cleanly define the edges of the white patches.

I knew I wanted more than a still life, so I photographed several people walking through the scene, but it was evident to me that I risked repeating myself. How many times had I found an interesting background and hoped for the right interesting character to walk by? Yes, I had succeeded many times before, but I wanted to challenge myself to do something different. Though I was tempted to stop shooting and move on, I urged myself to stay put and linger.

It was then that a flock of pigeons flew through the scene and I captured a single bird just as it was about to exit the frame. In that moment, I had that something different I had hoped for, a moment that I could not have anticipated when I stopped to consider the scene. What began as a response to color became a more much complex and interesting composition that was completed by the magic of the unexpected.

Reconsidering a Relationship to Color

Responding to color in this way is another way to avoid seeing the world literally. It is a way to examine the various elements in your line of sight as abstractions, and then use those elements as compositional building blocks.

We can and do have a visceral reaction to color, but we more commonly associate such reactions to smell or taste. This reaction is something to use because the goal is to recreate the moment of discovery for the viewer when they see the photograph. In a photograph you can evoke the same thrill of discovery you felt in another human being.

That is what I hoped to do with this image of a woman about to cross the street holding a red-and-white umbrella. I responded to the scene because of the contrasting colors of the umbrella and how they played off the yellow lines of the crosswalk. But that reaction to color also led me to consider the importance of the repeating shapes and patterns, which included the triangles of the umbrella and the lines in the crosswalk and street. It also led me to think about the importance of light, including the umbrella’s shadow.

Yes, the images in this chapter have color, and to some degree are about color, but they are also about the feeling they helped evoke in me when I discovered each scene. The challenge for me was to use my skills as a photographer to create a composition that allowed the viewer, who was not with me in that moment, to experience the scene vicariously through my eyes.