Colour and How to Control it

Colour has three qualities; Hue, Brilliance and Saturation. Saturation is the only quality that cannot be altered at the time of shooting a subject. Hue can be altered by applying colour filters to the camera's lens or by using different types of film. Using Tungsten-balanced film will give a blue haze to a photograph taken in natural daylight, on the other hand, using Daylight-balanced film to capture scenes lit by Tungsten lights will give a strong orange cast. Altering the White Balance on an advanced digital camera will also change the Hue of the colours within the photograph. The Brilliance of a subject can be altered by either over-exposing or under-exposing the image, however, doing so may result in loss of detail of some objects. All three qualities can be altered later using an image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.

Within this project I shall alter the aperture of my camera's lens to see how it effects the colour of my chosen subject.

42mm, 1/2sec, f/8, ISO-400







42mm, 1/2sec, f/9, ISO-400







42mm, 1/2sec, f/10, ISO-400 (average)







42mm, 1/2sec, f/11, ISO-400







42mm, 1/2sec, f/13, ISO-400

 

With my camera solid on a tripod, I positioned a bunch of flowers in front of the lens. My subjects of choice were a pair of Gerbera, these flowers are very large and bright red. Filling the frame as much as possible whilst preserving the most appealing composition I found the average exposure setting. At f/10 I needed to set the shutter speed to 1/2 a second in order to correctly expose the photograph. I then decreased the aperture by half a stop twice, captured each image, set the lens back to f/10 and increased the aperture by two half stops, capturing an image each time.

As well as the photographs varying from over-exposure to under-exposure the flower appears much brighter at f/8 than it does at f/13. This technique can be used to make subjects appear brighter or darker than they actually are. During the processing of the photographs, areas that are too light or dark can be darkened or lightened. In digital photography, multiple shots of the same image at different exposures can be merged together using photo editing software to lighten or darken specific areas.

Whilst placing my cursor of the lightest image in Adobe Photoshop, I can see in the "Info" panel that it has a much greater presence of blues and greens than that of the darker image.

Had there been a background to the shot there would also be a noticeable difference between the first and last shots. In the first shot the background would have been very out of focus and in the last shot it still would have been blurred but not by quite as much.