Week 1: Orange

Photo of the Week



Week 1 Assignment: Orange
Orange, one of my favorite colors, can be conveyed in many ways, I decided that the simplest way is to show you how the two colors of red and yellow combine to create orange.

At first, this seemed like it would be quite simple to do, just put a red light next to a yellow light and take a blurred picture and hope for the best. Well, turns out I don't have a red and a yellow light in my house. Christmas lights would have worked well, except all of mine are white, which is what gave me the idea in the first place from other photos I had taken over the holidays. My next plan was to find these to lights out in the world next to each other. I did not find many options, but did notice that a cars tail lights and blinker are the two colors I was looking for. This had potential, except the shapes were wrong and not close enought together...and there is that blinking problem. Another option I found was a traffic light. These were the right shape I was looking for, but they are not on at the same time. To solve this problem, I realized I could do a double exposure and offset each image so they overlapped. The results did not turn our quite like I had hoped since I was not able to get straight on with the light, or close enough.

The solution, create my own lights in a controlled location..my office. I looked through my filters to find a yellow and a red filter. (These were last used when I was shooting b&w film, but very glad I kept them..I knew they would come in handy some day.) All I needed now was a light source..a flashlight was just the right size for my filters to fit over. I only had the one flashlight, so a double exposure was still the best way to go and the image above was the outcome. I had always seen color wheels and things like that, but never seen two lights combine to form a third color. It was quite amazing to see it work.

Coming Next:
Week 2 Assignment: HDR (High Dynamic Range) First look