House Next Door 3

Comments welcomed . . .

I may like this the best. some of the others are just to regular for me. I like this schematic, motif, I'm not sure of the word here, wherein you take a white feature with a blue shadow, combined with splashes of brown (I would call it 'burnt siena' or other earth colors). In this particular image, I find the pavement less than satisfying. I would have cropped some of the pavement to make it less pronounced, or cropped some of the top to make it more pronounced. But I know you have thought deeply about that, and you are the artist, after all.

Cropping is so tricky. I often spend a long time testing different crops only to have someone suggest a better choice than my final decision.

I once went to a Photoshop workshop where the so called expert removed the blue reflection in the shadows from the walkway pavement; and I sat there in awe of his ignorance but more or so concerned that he likely influenced others to think the same thing. For some reason (likely they don?t study lighting in painting or have never taken a painting course [not from me anyway]) photographers, I am beginning to conclude, do not understand the phenomenon, reflected light, and those that do are usually unaware of the reflected colors that go with it that are generally displayed on the shadow side of objects; and those that understand this, don?t know that shadows under naturally light (white light or sunlight) are radically different from shadows under artificial light.

 

 

This is really strange; I just walked in the door, returning from art education conference in Chicago where (believe it or not) I explained the same concept to a female vendor who had written two manuals on Photoshop CS2; she, ironically, had taken several painting courses and remarked, funny, none of my professors told me that, to which I responded: Maybe they did not know. She understood complementary colors are found in shadows, however, she thought the same complementary colors were found under artificial lighting and sighted a shadow on a column in the vendor exhibition area.

 

 

Suffice it to say, the blue you observed is a reflection from the sky and tends to be easier to see in photographs than with the naked eye. Remember--for purple mountains majesty? The purple is reflected light or light reflected in the shadowy side of the mountain. (Got to go; need rest).

 

I just realized that the color combination I described above is characteristic of John Singer Sargent's watercolors, particularly when he is painting white sculpture and architecture in the northern Italian sun. Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer (esp. watercolors) revel in blue shadows. The intensity of the blue seems characteristic of late afternoon up north, or near the ocean or the Caribbean or Mediterranean.

I think all photographers would benefit from trying watercolors. Learning to use the white of the paper to give luminance to washes, makes you look at light and color in special ways.

I agree luminance is one of the pluses of electronic color. But you have to control the RGB because these frequences tend to have a life of their own. I think this is why old picture tubs and newer LCD panels used a black dot interface to cut down and limit the intense colour frequencies.

 

 

Actually the intense colour you have mentioned before in my work is partially due to the lost of values in the conversion from JPEG to GIF in order to upload the photograph. Sometimes I forget to lighten the jpeg a little to compensate for the lost. The gif's tend to look higher in contrast when infact they lose essential color detail. Thanks for the interest.

 

On another note, I took about 700 or so photos while in Chicago last week and I am going to post some of the street shots as soon as I get a chance. I will be interested in your take on my street shots since I have not posted any thus far.

 

Thanks for the comments and take care.