Exercise 3.2 - Primary and Secondary Colors

The idea of the task was to take 6 pictures, each representing one color out of the spectrum. What makes this task more complicated that it should not be artificial objects, like red door or blue teapot. The objects should be more natural instead. 

I must admit, that fulfilling such exercise in the mid of March in Estonia is a complete disappointment! The only colors you can find here this time is grey and white, because of the amount of melting dirty snow and cloudy sky. If it was autumn, I could easily take 6 nice landscape pictures that would work perfect for this exercise.  Unfortunately, this time I should mostly limit myself to macro pictures and use some of my earlier pictures. I just decided that they are good enough for the exercise and it would be a mistake to use something worse instead.

So, first of all, here is the colors spectrum that I had to represent in the exercise:

1. Green. 

This is one of the few green things that you can find outside in this season of the year. 

90mm; f/3.2; 1/600 sec 

2. Yellow

What can be more yellow than a melon on a yellow plate? It seems like the focus could be moved a bit upward. And I am not very sure about the composition. It looks strange...

 

90mm; f/4.5; 1/40 sec

3. Orange 

This is a lantern light in the night with a lot of insects on it. This is one of the older pictures taken in summer. 

155mm; f/6.3; 1/1000 sec

4. Red

The good thing about this picture is tat it has different tones and variations of red color, from the most saturated red berries to slightly rose leaves.   

250mm; f/6.3; 1/60sec

5. Purple

This picture was taken in October last year from one of Tallinn bridges. I remember this amazing evening, all kinds of colors in the sky, and when sun was nearly in down, it became deep purple.   

120mm; f/6.0; 1/3 sec

6. Blue

This shot has been taken on Create Island last summer. I just decided, that it would be good to use it, as it  shows different tones of the blue, including 'classical' blue from the spectrum of colors.

85mm; f/10.0; 1/250 sec

This exercise shows the diversity of the colors and by taking each picture at different exposures, I could again learn the importance of the color saturation. 

Exercise 3.1 - Control the strength of a color

The second assignment has been completed, and I a moving further with exercises for the third part of the course.

This exercise was supposed to show, how the color changes with different exposures. I had already noticed this feature before, taking landscapes pictures, when sky is very bright. This time I have chosen rose color wall with some shadows on it. All shots were taken at 250mm focal length and ISO200.

So, here are the pictures of the same object at different exposures:

f/7.1; 1/200 sec

f/8.0; 1/200 sec

f/9.0; 1/200 sec

f/10.0; 1/200 sec

f/11; 1/200 sec

f/13.0; 1/200 sec

f/16.0; 1/200 sec 

The camera was showing the of f/10 and 1/200 sec as a perfect combination. If I was choosing the best shot out of them, I would take one of the underexposed - the one taken at f/11.0 or at f/13.0, because the color looks stronger on these two shots. 

The conclusion from this exercise is that colors look stronger, if image is underexposed, and the other way around.