TAOP Part 3 Colour - Exercise 1 - Control the Strength of Colour

TAOP Part 3 Colour

Exercise 1 - Control the Strength of Colour

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that through the manual control of camera exposure, colour can be controlled. I've used a Poinsettia for its vibrant red colour; note for this exercise I've looked to capture colour and not consider other framing elements that I would normally. These images below are all unprocessed jpegs straight from the camera. I have not used any RAW files

Image 1

This is the base position starting in aperture priority at f/5.6 with a camera set shutter speed of 0.5 seconds. Understanding this is the camera set exposure I will for the next set of images set the camera to manual, the shutter speed to 0.5 seconds then alter the aperture from f/5.6 to a wider aperture to over expose and a smaller aperture to under expose.


Image 2

In this image I have over exposed  manually setting the the exposure 1 stop below my known perfect exposure setting the aperture to a wider setting of f/4


Image 3

The exposure is now 1/2 stop under at f/4.5


Image 4 

The aperture increased now to f/6.3 to be half a stop under exposed than the camera measured perfect exposure in image 1


Image 5

This image has been taken one stop under exposed using again a smaller aperture of f/8 with a fixed shutter speed


Concluding this exercise I now have 1 image correctly exposed (image 1), 2 over exposed images (2 and 3) and 2 under exposed images (4 and 5)

Exercise Observations

The over exposed images begin show the colour red a little washed out and weaker than the correctly exposed image getting weaker as the image is under exposed by the wider aperture.  The two under exposed images show the colour red starting to get richer and darker and perhaps more concentrated.

In my personal view of the images taken, image 4 half-stop under exposed is still close to a good exposure but the others in this instance appear to under or over exposed.

Michael Freeman describes in his book "The Photographer's Eye" exposure as being able to alter a colour's strength, its saturation.

Chris Rutter in his book "the essential Color Manual for photographer's" p 128 suggests under exposing images taken in winter by one or 2 stops to help combat snow appearing grey and drab since the camera's exposure may have been fooled by the colour of the snow and tries to expose it as a grey colour. 

Through previous experience I've also found that using a polarising filter can also strengthen colours within an image, in addition to help reducing light reflections on water