**The Art of Color in Photography: A Study of Tonal Palette and Composition**

In the world of photography, color is often an afterthought, relegated to the realm of post-processing and editing. However, when approached with care and intention, color can be a powerful tool in enhancing composition and evoking emotion. This article will explore the ways in which photographers can harness the power of color to create visually stunning images.

One of the most striking aspects of photography is the way in which technology can dictate the quality of color representation. In the past, many photographers were shooting on film stock that was prone to fading or degradation over time, resulting in a loss of vibrancy and accuracy. This can be seen in older images where colors are often muted or washed out, yet still possess a certain nostalgic charm. For example, an image taken by Magnum photographer Fernando Sartor, featuring warm yellows and subdued skin tones, is a masterclass in the use of color to evoke emotion.

In contrast to these more faded images, contemporary photographers such as Orig Gers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible with color. Their work often features bold, vibrant hues that seem to leap off the screen. In the case of their "Exploding Still Life" series, which features freeze-dried flowers in a dark background, the colors are expertly balanced to create a sense of harmony and order. The use of Reds, oranges, and purples is particularly noteworthy, as it adds depth and visual interest to the images without overwhelming the viewer.

Dan Winters, another photographer known for his work with large format film and the C41 process, creates similarly evocative images. His portraits are characterized by a subdued color palette that belies their emotional intensity. In the case of his beautiful image of Leonardo DiCaprio, the muted tones create a sense of intimacy and quiet contemplation, drawing the viewer in and refusing to let go.

Another photographer whose work we've discussed before is Orig Gers, who uses bold colors to create visually striking images. His use of color is often subtle, with similar hues and tones used throughout an image to create a sense of continuity. This can be seen in his "Exploding Still Life" series, where the flowers are depicted against a turquoise-blue background that seems almost luminescent.

In contrast to these more vibrant images, some photographers are pushing the boundaries of color even further by experimenting with monochromatic colors. While not strictly black and white, this approach involves using a single hue or limited palette to create a sense of cohesion and harmony. In the case of Dan Winters' work, his use of muted colors often borders on monochromatic, yet still manages to evoke a sense of depth and dimensionality.

Finally, no discussion of color in photography would be complete without mentioning the power of white balance. When it comes to capturing images in different lighting conditions, achieving accurate white balance can be a challenge. However, when done correctly, white balance can add an additional layer of depth and realism to an image. In the case of Dan Winters' photograph of the space shuttle, the cloudy sky is captured with remarkable accuracy, adding to the overall sense of atmosphere and mood.

**The Takeaway: Harnessing Color in Your Composition**

In conclusion, color is a powerful tool that can be used to enhance composition and evoke emotion in your images. By paying attention to the way colors work together and using techniques such as subtle color gradations and bold contrasts, you can create visually stunning images that engage and captivate your audience. Whether you're shooting film or digital, remember that color is an integral part of the creative process, and with practice and patience, you can develop a sense of what works for you and what doesn't.

As we continue to explore the art of photography, I encourage you to keep a keen eye on color in your work. Don't be afraid to experiment with different palettes and techniques, and don't be limited by traditional notions of what is "colorful" or "not colorful." By embracing color as an integral part of your creative process, you can unlock new levels of expression and creativity, and produce images that truly stand out from the crowd.

**The Art of Photography: TV**

For more information on photography techniques and tips, be sure to check out our website at theartofphotography.tv. We offer a wealth of resources, including articles, videos, and tutorials, designed to help you improve your skills and take your photography to the next level.

If you have any questions or comments about color in photography, hit us up on social media or Twitter, or join the conversation on Facebook. We'd love to hear from you!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody welcome back once again to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes today we're talking about color we're going to continue on in our composition series uh but before we do I want to make a couple announcements um if you haven't visited the website in a while you might want to do that um we've got some new stuff that we're doing I have a second podcast that I do with my buddy Wade Griffith who's an excellent photographer it's a little bit different format it's Audio Only and we're able to go a longer duration and talk about more stuff it's very much more casual less researched and uh anyway we sit around and talk about the subject that we all love the most which is photography and if you want to know how to subscribe to that and you want to know what's going on with that visit our website which is the art of photography. TV and another thing I want to talk about too um you know we've done Twitter for a while and we've recently started um using more of the Facebook page and I think this is really important because I'm able to post daily things in there and if you like what you see on the show and you want to be you know in the loop and and get more uh basically get more information uh the Facebook page is an incredible way to go and we're really trying to expand the reach of the show so we can do more on it so check that out if you get a chance anyway the links are all on the website so go to the art of photography. TV check it out and let me know what you think you can leave a comment there um but today back to the uh the episode at hand we are talking about color now I want to do a disclaimer up front um what we're not talking about today is I'm not going to talk about like you know color value studies tones um saturation color wheel we're not going into any kind of color theory at all I'm going to assume that you already know some of this we will do an episode on this uh down the road but I think it's really important for the composition series not to get bogged in in that at first I'd rather look at how you can use color to enhance your composition and some ways of doing that and I want to talk about historically where color kind of comes into play in photography you know photography was not invented in color color came much later and there was a long-term um period where the acceptance of color photography is real photography you know just didn't exist people didn't look at it that way now I think we think of that totally different um we'll talk about that in just a second um because photography now you have to go actually make it black and white if you're in the digital world whereas you know before color was something was very foreign so it's just kind of a paradigm shift than where we are today and so I think it's a skill that is been lost a little bit along the way uh because of you know what we're brought up on shooting digital photos so anyway I want to talk about it I want to show some examples of some some colorists that I think are really good at this throughout history and so let's go look at some images and talk about color Okay so we're talking about the use of color in composition and you know how this is done with a pretty nice effect I think um throughout history and a couple things to remember here is that you know photography did not start out in color uh you know photography well there's there's kind of two points to this photography started out uh merely in monochrome black and white images and color was more or less something that came along later in various processes and today it's kind of hard for us to imagine those terms because black and white is not native anymore we tend to shoot on digital cameras and the colors reproduced right there the other thing that's interesting is modern cameras are built for Extreme color accuracy or they try to be anyway and I think one thing that kind of gets lost that I think is important and that's why I wanted to do this episode on color as it relates to composition because I think there's something that to be said for some kind of sometimes the crudeness or the the things that you know aren't really natural or don't work having said that couple things I want to look at um this is a really early color image and it's not a whole lot of color going on in here but this is uh the uh the pond Moonlight by Edward Sten and it's a beautiful image it's gum by chromate process and gum by chromate allowed some color manipulation so when you did the print you could do multiple layers of it and you could indeed suggest color and you can see that the color though in modern terms probably is not accurate um it's probably subdued it's faded a certain way um and and the other thing that I don't know because with by chromate I didn't see this when it was originally made obviously so you know the effects of time on an image like this are something to consider too of of whether or not it stays but it's a very curious use of color particularly the time that Sten was shooting and there was not a lot of color at that time the other point I want to make though is and I think this is is important too is that the art world really didn't view color as acceptable for a long time and we'll come back to where that came into play but this is a little bit later this is 1925 and this was a feature that was run in National Geographic magazine and it's labeled the young women of trolei in Holiday dresses and there was I'll go ahead and click on the link here um I'll put this in the show notes as well but there's other images from this spread too people were not used to seeing color images at this time and so this was something that was fairly knew was fairly different in the case of National Geographic though they were going for sharing something with the world you know and not an artistic representation of something and this was an autochrome process which was the first oh commercial tried andrue process and you know these were made on plates in fact I've got an image here of a package of autochrome plates um it was a black and white based ulion that had some die transfer that was going on in there as well the exposure time you know the iso was so slow on these it was like about a second exposure that that a lot of these were taken at um when you blow these up they're extremely grainy I don't know if you can see that in the larger example you can uh they're very grainy it was not a real beautiful process but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there are some things that are very hauntingly interesting about this image every now and then it's kind of popular to see on the internet people will link up to various early representations of Photography in various countries and you know there was a certain uh you know Beauty to that now color was not I think as far as fine art goes that the museum world or the Fine Art World looked at color is you know something that was not accepted in in the art community it was you know more like black and white was the true representation of Photography was the way to do things artistically because you were removed from reality be having a complete lack of color and I've stated this you know on the podcast before but the guy who came along who changed that was William aglon and agon's work is very controversial um some people love it some people completely hate it uh this was an image from Greenwood Mississippi 1974 this is the red ceiling it's very famous and there was a show that went on in New York in 1976 I believe where uh 76 or 78 I believe 76 at MoMA where all of a sudden William egon's work was shown it was a big breakthrough because all of a sudden here was this extreme color photography um that was now being taken seriously as fine art uh this is kind of Andy Warhol era um you know things were changing and I think it was time for that but what's interesting about egon's work um and I'll show you a couple other pictures this was another one that I just think is extremely beautiful a lot of this early color work um which these were die transfer prints the colors are not accurate the white balance has some issues uh there's a real retro kind of nostalgic feel to these compositions and the color has a lot to do with that uh I love this composition this woman with the hair and you don't see her face it's just her back to you and these two women smoking in a booth at a restaurant um I just think it's it's got an amazing nostalgic feel and it's it's quite beautiful I think it's also worth noting that Egleston because he was one of these first guys to come along and have this taken seriously when you start to look and note the use of color um and you know as we've talked about Rhythm and patterns before using objects or subjects if you look at something like this the way the red shoe Echoes this face that's on the shopping bag um you start to see connections like that and this is something I feel has been lost in recent years with a lot of photographers because I think we're so used to color and we take it for granted sometimes that it's not thought out a lot of times and you don't have to get into a lot of heavy color theory necessarily but it's just simply you know a way of thinking about it um this is another one of my favorites which Segways into the next guy I'm going talk about this is just a woman in a Subway I think this is one of heon's wonderful shots I just love this there's an abstraction because you can't see the woman's face um the color is is just it's very toned down it's very it's not real prominent in this image there there's not a lot of Reds there's not a lot of things that grab your eye it's blues and greens and deeper colors like that so anyway really beautiful stuff um another gentleman who was a well-known photographer at the time but not for his color work uh Saul leader did a lot of magazine work and he shot mostly in black and white because that's what Publications were were done in at the time and probably in the 1990s uh his work was rediscovered and he did a lot of these color images that were just personal work that he had done uh they weren't really shown to anyone and he's become known for this somebody St documentary on him that's coming out pretty soon and this work is elegant it's beautiful it's interesting uh there's abstraction that creeps into it this is a guy in a taxi presumably the yellows and the Reds and also you know the technology these people were shooting on dictated how these colors were going to come out a lot of times where you have kind of a faded quality to them this is probably I'm going on a limb guessing here but it looks to me like early c41 process or something like that and it's not accurate color representation but there's something that has such a great feel to it because it's not accurate um The Faded quality to it again with the you know kind of nostalgic sense that you get from some of these this one's absolutely gorgeous it's a taken through a fogged up window in Winter a guy with a yellow truck behind it very simple but the color is what really makes this work this would be a good image in black and white but the color is what really brings this out and makes it prominent I think that's important to note um a couple other things here this is interesting too again uh you know an older image this is um you know from the great Magnum photographer Fernando skana and again just a very beautiful image with the yellows the skin tones uh they're very subdued it's just a beautiful picture and I think the color has that a lot to do with that also worth noting in this is notice that the color tends to be and when I say monochrome in this case I don't mean black and white but you see a lot of yellows skin tones again there's not much that's contrasting this there's not blatant Reds or greens or blues or you know it's it's it's kind of matched in Hue as you know far as that goes and I I think that's a a beautiful fact that a few people are doing but again it's it's you don't see a lot of people doing that these days um some contemporary work this is orig gers and we've talked about him before when we did the tempo episode and again these are the exploding still life flowers and I think they're just really gorgeous in how you have this dark background that blends in with one the motion of these flowers imp ploting they're freeze-dried and then blown up as they're being photographed but again you see these Reds oranges maybe a little purple that that come in but everything works in a very harmonious sort of way and you know there's not a lot of there's not so much going on that it becomes distracting to to another color or something you know there's a lot of order it's not chaotic um and then a couple images by one of the I think one of the great photographers working today these are portraits by Dan Winters who's a Texas photographer um and this is um Laura darn beautiful image uh notice that and I know that he shoots large format and he shoots um c41 process film and again has a little more subdued look to it uh the white balance isn't entirely accurate all the time in this case you do have a contrast but still very simple skin tone is one color blonde hair red lipstick contrasting with the with the kind of turquoise is blue background green thing and you know again there's not other colors there to distract all of a sudden you don't start to see oranges or you know purples or something like that it it there there's a there's a a continuity to it there's a Harmony quality to it uh very well-known portrait of Leonardo DiCaprio that he did very similar quality it's it's very muted very subdued um it's almost darker and Whispers to you a little bit and these are just very beautiful portraits and then finally this is another Dan Winter's image of um space shuttle and notice that the white balance on this is definitely off this is a cloudy day um I don't know the technical um objects that he shot with as far as um what type of film what process but again it's the look we're going for and this is what I want you guys to see in this is is is again it's muted colors a lot of similarities this is almost a black and white image but the color gives it just a little bit of lift so all these images and this is what I want you to have the Takeaway on here you know we didn't do a color Theory episode we didn't do you know and we could do that later but for now I want to kind of create oh a sense that you guys can be conscious of of using Color to work in your composition and I think that's where you're going to start to get really interesting results and something that I don't see a lot of photographers doing nowadays and I think it's you know something worth striving for again extend your range considerably anyway if you have any questions anything hit me up on uh the Twitter the Facebook the flicker whichever you choose um or check out our website which is the artof photography. TV and thanks again for watching I will see you guys next timehey everybody welcome back once again to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes today we're talking about color we're going to continue on in our composition series uh but before we do I want to make a couple announcements um if you haven't visited the website in a while you might want to do that um we've got some new stuff that we're doing I have a second podcast that I do with my buddy Wade Griffith who's an excellent photographer it's a little bit different format it's Audio Only and we're able to go a longer duration and talk about more stuff it's very much more casual less researched and uh anyway we sit around and talk about the subject that we all love the most which is photography and if you want to know how to subscribe to that and you want to know what's going on with that visit our website which is the art of photography. TV and another thing I want to talk about too um you know we've done Twitter for a while and we've recently started um using more of the Facebook page and I think this is really important because I'm able to post daily things in there and if you like what you see on the show and you want to be you know in the loop and and get more uh basically get more information uh the Facebook page is an incredible way to go and we're really trying to expand the reach of the show so we can do more on it so check that out if you get a chance anyway the links are all on the website so go to the art of photography. TV check it out and let me know what you think you can leave a comment there um but today back to the uh the episode at hand we are talking about color now I want to do a disclaimer up front um what we're not talking about today is I'm not going to talk about like you know color value studies tones um saturation color wheel we're not going into any kind of color theory at all I'm going to assume that you already know some of this we will do an episode on this uh down the road but I think it's really important for the composition series not to get bogged in in that at first I'd rather look at how you can use color to enhance your composition and some ways of doing that and I want to talk about historically where color kind of comes into play in photography you know photography was not invented in color color came much later and there was a long-term um period where the acceptance of color photography is real photography you know just didn't exist people didn't look at it that way now I think we think of that totally different um we'll talk about that in just a second um because photography now you have to go actually make it black and white if you're in the digital world whereas you know before color was something was very foreign so it's just kind of a paradigm shift than where we are today and so I think it's a skill that is been lost a little bit along the way uh because of you know what we're brought up on shooting digital photos so anyway I want to talk about it I want to show some examples of some some colorists that I think are really good at this throughout history and so let's go look at some images and talk about color Okay so we're talking about the use of color in composition and you know how this is done with a pretty nice effect I think um throughout history and a couple things to remember here is that you know photography did not start out in color uh you know photography well there's there's kind of two points to this photography started out uh merely in monochrome black and white images and color was more or less something that came along later in various processes and today it's kind of hard for us to imagine those terms because black and white is not native anymore we tend to shoot on digital cameras and the colors reproduced right there the other thing that's interesting is modern cameras are built for Extreme color accuracy or they try to be anyway and I think one thing that kind of gets lost that I think is important and that's why I wanted to do this episode on color as it relates to composition because I think there's something that to be said for some kind of sometimes the crudeness or the the things that you know aren't really natural or don't work having said that couple things I want to look at um this is a really early color image and it's not a whole lot of color going on in here but this is uh the uh the pond Moonlight by Edward Sten and it's a beautiful image it's gum by chromate process and gum by chromate allowed some color manipulation so when you did the print you could do multiple layers of it and you could indeed suggest color and you can see that the color though in modern terms probably is not accurate um it's probably subdued it's faded a certain way um and and the other thing that I don't know because with by chromate I didn't see this when it was originally made obviously so you know the effects of time on an image like this are something to consider too of of whether or not it stays but it's a very curious use of color particularly the time that Sten was shooting and there was not a lot of color at that time the other point I want to make though is and I think this is is important too is that the art world really didn't view color as acceptable for a long time and we'll come back to where that came into play but this is a little bit later this is 1925 and this was a feature that was run in National Geographic magazine and it's labeled the young women of trolei in Holiday dresses and there was I'll go ahead and click on the link here um I'll put this in the show notes as well but there's other images from this spread too people were not used to seeing color images at this time and so this was something that was fairly knew was fairly different in the case of National Geographic though they were going for sharing something with the world you know and not an artistic representation of something and this was an autochrome process which was the first oh commercial tried andrue process and you know these were made on plates in fact I've got an image here of a package of autochrome plates um it was a black and white based ulion that had some die transfer that was going on in there as well the exposure time you know the iso was so slow on these it was like about a second exposure that that a lot of these were taken at um when you blow these up they're extremely grainy I don't know if you can see that in the larger example you can uh they're very grainy it was not a real beautiful process but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there are some things that are very hauntingly interesting about this image every now and then it's kind of popular to see on the internet people will link up to various early representations of Photography in various countries and you know there was a certain uh you know Beauty to that now color was not I think as far as fine art goes that the museum world or the Fine Art World looked at color is you know something that was not accepted in in the art community it was you know more like black and white was the true representation of Photography was the way to do things artistically because you were removed from reality be having a complete lack of color and I've stated this you know on the podcast before but the guy who came along who changed that was William aglon and agon's work is very controversial um some people love it some people completely hate it uh this was an image from Greenwood Mississippi 1974 this is the red ceiling it's very famous and there was a show that went on in New York in 1976 I believe where uh 76 or 78 I believe 76 at MoMA where all of a sudden William egon's work was shown it was a big breakthrough because all of a sudden here was this extreme color photography um that was now being taken seriously as fine art uh this is kind of Andy Warhol era um you know things were changing and I think it was time for that but what's interesting about egon's work um and I'll show you a couple other pictures this was another one that I just think is extremely beautiful a lot of this early color work um which these were die transfer prints the colors are not accurate the white balance has some issues uh there's a real retro kind of nostalgic feel to these compositions and the color has a lot to do with that uh I love this composition this woman with the hair and you don't see her face it's just her back to you and these two women smoking in a booth at a restaurant um I just think it's it's got an amazing nostalgic feel and it's it's quite beautiful I think it's also worth noting that Egleston because he was one of these first guys to come along and have this taken seriously when you start to look and note the use of color um and you know as we've talked about Rhythm and patterns before using objects or subjects if you look at something like this the way the red shoe Echoes this face that's on the shopping bag um you start to see connections like that and this is something I feel has been lost in recent years with a lot of photographers because I think we're so used to color and we take it for granted sometimes that it's not thought out a lot of times and you don't have to get into a lot of heavy color theory necessarily but it's just simply you know a way of thinking about it um this is another one of my favorites which Segways into the next guy I'm going talk about this is just a woman in a Subway I think this is one of heon's wonderful shots I just love this there's an abstraction because you can't see the woman's face um the color is is just it's very toned down it's very it's not real prominent in this image there there's not a lot of Reds there's not a lot of things that grab your eye it's blues and greens and deeper colors like that so anyway really beautiful stuff um another gentleman who was a well-known photographer at the time but not for his color work uh Saul leader did a lot of magazine work and he shot mostly in black and white because that's what Publications were were done in at the time and probably in the 1990s uh his work was rediscovered and he did a lot of these color images that were just personal work that he had done uh they weren't really shown to anyone and he's become known for this somebody St documentary on him that's coming out pretty soon and this work is elegant it's beautiful it's interesting uh there's abstraction that creeps into it this is a guy in a taxi presumably the yellows and the Reds and also you know the technology these people were shooting on dictated how these colors were going to come out a lot of times where you have kind of a faded quality to them this is probably I'm going on a limb guessing here but it looks to me like early c41 process or something like that and it's not accurate color representation but there's something that has such a great feel to it because it's not accurate um The Faded quality to it again with the you know kind of nostalgic sense that you get from some of these this one's absolutely gorgeous it's a taken through a fogged up window in Winter a guy with a yellow truck behind it very simple but the color is what really makes this work this would be a good image in black and white but the color is what really brings this out and makes it prominent I think that's important to note um a couple other things here this is interesting too again uh you know an older image this is um you know from the great Magnum photographer Fernando skana and again just a very beautiful image with the yellows the skin tones uh they're very subdued it's just a beautiful picture and I think the color has that a lot to do with that also worth noting in this is notice that the color tends to be and when I say monochrome in this case I don't mean black and white but you see a lot of yellows skin tones again there's not much that's contrasting this there's not blatant Reds or greens or blues or you know it's it's it's kind of matched in Hue as you know far as that goes and I I think that's a a beautiful fact that a few people are doing but again it's it's you don't see a lot of people doing that these days um some contemporary work this is orig gers and we've talked about him before when we did the tempo episode and again these are the exploding still life flowers and I think they're just really gorgeous in how you have this dark background that blends in with one the motion of these flowers imp ploting they're freeze-dried and then blown up as they're being photographed but again you see these Reds oranges maybe a little purple that that come in but everything works in a very harmonious sort of way and you know there's not a lot of there's not so much going on that it becomes distracting to to another color or something you know there's a lot of order it's not chaotic um and then a couple images by one of the I think one of the great photographers working today these are portraits by Dan Winters who's a Texas photographer um and this is um Laura darn beautiful image uh notice that and I know that he shoots large format and he shoots um c41 process film and again has a little more subdued look to it uh the white balance isn't entirely accurate all the time in this case you do have a contrast but still very simple skin tone is one color blonde hair red lipstick contrasting with the with the kind of turquoise is blue background green thing and you know again there's not other colors there to distract all of a sudden you don't start to see oranges or you know purples or something like that it it there there's a there's a a continuity to it there's a Harmony quality to it uh very well-known portrait of Leonardo DiCaprio that he did very similar quality it's it's very muted very subdued um it's almost darker and Whispers to you a little bit and these are just very beautiful portraits and then finally this is another Dan Winter's image of um space shuttle and notice that the white balance on this is definitely off this is a cloudy day um I don't know the technical um objects that he shot with as far as um what type of film what process but again it's the look we're going for and this is what I want you guys to see in this is is is again it's muted colors a lot of similarities this is almost a black and white image but the color gives it just a little bit of lift so all these images and this is what I want you to have the Takeaway on here you know we didn't do a color Theory episode we didn't do you know and we could do that later but for now I want to kind of create oh a sense that you guys can be conscious of of using Color to work in your composition and I think that's where you're going to start to get really interesting results and something that I don't see a lot of photographers doing nowadays and I think it's you know something worth striving for again extend your range considerably anyway if you have any questions anything hit me up on uh the Twitter the Facebook the flicker whichever you choose um or check out our website which is the artof photography. TV and thanks again for watching I will see you guys next time\n"