P#5 Q#4a: I Love Color -- How Do I Use Color to Add More Wow! to My Photographs?

Color can both enhance and cause problems in a photo

Rob Sheppard: Color is obviously a very important part of our world. Color has the ability to really enhance a picture or it can cause problems in a picture.

Again, just like light, you could spend a lot of time reading about color, learning about color, and there are whole books that are devoted to it.

But one of the things that I think is helpful, again, is to kind of go back into a theme of mind and look at creating photographs and look at your LCD. Look at what the colors are doing, not just what the subject is but what are the colors actually doing.

Then start looking for color within the photograph. Very often, this means just changing your position slightly. So often what people will do is they'll photograph a subject from an angle that they think makes the subject look good.

But they don't necessarily look for what's going on in the background for color, what's going on in the foreground for color, what could they use in the background or foreground for color, and how could they enhance the picture because of their choice of that color.

Sometimes if you move a little bit to the left, maybe you've got a better color, a richer color behind your subject.

On the other hand, you may have to move to your right because there's a distracting color in the background.

One of the things that you learn very quickly about color is there are certain colors, such as red or orange, that are very strong colors.

So if you have this nice gently colored subject and you've got something bright red in the background, that may immediately take your viewer away from your subject. You wouldn't want that so you'd want to actually avoid that color in the background in that case.

On the other hand, you may have a silhouette of a subject, or some dark subject and in one direction your background doesn't have much color but you move slightly and all of a sudden, you've got maybe some glowing red because the light has come from behind something and given a backlight.

In conclusion

When thinking about color in photography, don't just focus on the subject. Check the color in the background, and move to the left or right to see if the color changes.

Avoid colors that might overshadow your subject. Look at the colors, and see if they enhance or detract from your subject.