Color and Texture | photography1

Color and Texture

From high school through to my present day college career, I have developed a group of friends that mean so much to me. As a massive part of my life, they have propelled me forward through good and bad. In order to honor them and document their importance to me, I originally planned on interviewing each of them and dedicating a picture to each of their interests and values. Yet, once I began the interviews, I noticed that most of my friends valued very similar things despite their unique interests. When I tried to think of ways to show the difference between all of my friends’ similar values, I was reminded of our color portraits.

Despite using the same colors, my classmates and I made color portraits that feel completely different. For example, Kathine and I both composed blue color portraits for Wali, yet even though the overall focus was the same, the outcomes were different. When looking back at them, I found the effect texture can have on color very interesting. Since the beginning of the semester, I always found closeups interesting so shifting my focus from the differences between my friends to the differences texture can have on color was exciting.

After doing some research and familiarizing myself with master work close up photography, I was beaming with inspiration. My goal was to create contrast between two similar color pictures for a total of five sets. However, when beginning the photo taking process, I quickly ran into some problems. When I was first taking pictures, I was not sure how effective they were. The pictures would be the same color and have different textures, but they would feel a little bit too similar. Fixing this was a process of mass trial and error; I took as many same-color pictures I could and compared them all to find which types of pictures created the most clear opposing emotional responses. The pictures then became more effective once I began editing the images and was able to darken or lighten the photos.

With how helpful editing was, I also ran into problems while editing. I noticed that, although the pictures would look great on my camera’s screen, they would be blurry when transferred to my laptop for editing. Because I was taking close ups, my camera was not able to properly focus on something that shallow. When I tried retaking the pictures with a higher aperture, even when pinning the camera against a stable surface, the pictures would still be blurry. In the end, I was able to find a good balance between a higher aperture and a faster shutter speed, but I regret that I was not able to take pictures at the same level of crispness that the professional photographers that I researched were able to.

Color has a great effect on how pictures make me feel and that effect can change depending on the context of the color. In this project, I focused on the effect texture has on color. My hope is that you can go on a small roller coaster of emotions when going through each of my pictures.

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