Welcome to episode 29 of the Tuesday Photo Challenge! Seeing all the great entries to last week’s theme of Nature’s Beauty gave me the idea to take a look at what makes nature photography stand out, particularly color photography: Color Contrast.
A lot of what makes for a good photograph, especially when Nature is the subject, is derived from the work of Ansel Adams. In his writings about photography, Adams talks about the zone system as a means for correlating what the photographer visualizes and the final print product. A key aspect is the amount of contrast that exists between parts of the image. While the system was developed for black and white photography, its principles can be applied to color photography.
In color photography, we have the additional luxury of using color to create additional contrast between the various components of the image. This week’s challenge is to use color contrast in your photos to its best advantage. These can be complementary colors, or subtle tonal gradations; I’ll leave the choices to you…
This image is from a recent trip to the Iceland where I had the opportunity explore the geothermal area in Hverir; this area has steam vents, hot water welling up from the ground and generally a great look to it. In this shot I wanted to use the coloring of the ground and contrast it against the blue sky; additional the blue of the sky is reflected in the hot water run-off to create additional interest.
For those who’d like to participate in this weekly challenge, the rules are the following:
- Write a post with an image for this week’s topic
- Please tag your post with fpj-photo-challenge (if you’re not sure about how tags work, please check out this WordPress article about tagging posts)
- Create a pingback link to this post, so that I can create a post showing all of the submissions over the week (note: pingbacks may not appear immediately, as my site is set up to require approval for linking to it; helps against previous bad experiences with spamming)
- Have fun creating something new (or sharing something old)!!
I’m counting on all of you to come up with some really cool choices; keep in mind that color is everywhere and not just in Nature! Have fun and start sharing!
Technical Details
This image was captured with a Canon EOS 5D MkIII using an EF24-105mm f/4L lens. Exposure settings were at 1/400 second with f/11 and 200 ISO.
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