Iceland One-Off - Color
When I was the staff photographer at the College of Architecture at Virginia Tech, I used to joke, “I see in black and white. I only shoot color for money.” It was true though. My personal work was with large format black and white film, but most paying clients wanted large and smaller format color images. There was also a hidden truth in that comment. I had worked hard to learn to “see” in black and white, to understand how tonal values would be rendered in a final black and white print, and if color had anything to do with an image, it had to do with what color filter I needed to use to get the tonal contrasts I wanted in the black and white image. Unfortunately, I’ve never learned to “see” in color. That may sound strange, because it’s not as if I’m color blind, but it’s true. “Seeing” is more than just what is visible to the eye. Seeing in color involves an awareness of color, an understanding of how the various colors in a subject are interacting and whether they contribute to or detract from an image. As often as I’ve tried to study color theory - from writings by artists like Wassily Kandinsky to photographic explanations (don’t get me going on color wheels and complementary colors) - it has never “stuck” and I’ve never gotten to the point where I can “see” the subtle color relationships in an image before I’m making it. Listening to Joe Cornish talk about the subtle color relationships in one of his images reminds me just how far I have to go. It’s a hole in my photography large enough to drive a truck through.
Ann, while similarly lacking in the formal training, is quite a bit more sensitive to color than I am. She’s perceptive to color in ways I’m simply not. For evidence, just take a look at her image, the subject of a blog post from April 20, 2024, here. Only in my wildest dreams could I look out and sense how the color of the background to a potential subject transitions from warm to cool, and incorporate that into my compositional thinking.
So imagine my delight one afternoon in Sey∂isfjör∂ur when I hopped out of the bimobil, looked up and actually noticed the cool-warm color contrasts of the clouds overhead. I immediately had to grab the baby Leica to make some images.
Ok, it was pretty obvious (like slap you in the face obvious), but at least I “saw” it. And, I still can’t tell you what color complements chartreuse (whatever the hell color “chartreuse” is), but, at least my eye and brain recognized that aspect of the sky that day.
Baby steps. It all starts with baby steps.