Welcome to our first bi-monthly art photography eZineIn our first issue we explore the Selective Colour photos you can see in our on line photo galleries with an article about the process and the content of the exhibitions by Paul Williams. Get a free ebook of Burano and find out about Paul Strand. Selective Colour Fine Art Photography by Paul Williams The Process Selective colour is one of those seductive techniques that seems to be an instant fix to turn any photo into art. But as with most easily accessible photo techniques it is important to understand why and how it works and not to just use it randomly on all photos. One of the first photos that fascinated me was a portrait of me & my brother as young children that had been hand coloured by the local portrait photographer. This influenced my experiments of mixing colour and black & white in my photography . Initially I used photo dyes on black and white prints so when digital photography became available using the computer to isolate colours was a logical progression.
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Selective colour pulls together the two opposing genre of black & white photography and colour photography. The magic of black & white photography is that it strips away colour to reveal texture and form. The lack of colour allows action and detail to be highlighted and interpreted by the viewer in a direct and potent way. That is not to say that black and white photography is a more powerful medium than colour photography, it simply to say that black & white photography communicates differently from colour photography. The black & white photo was an important recorder and participant of Modernist art and as such is seen as artistic photography. Colour has a more recent history in photography than black and white. Initially purists rejected colour photography as an artistic medium referring to colour photography as "commercial". Today this Luddite view is redundant and colour photographs have taken their rightful place amongst the masterpieces of photography. Colour in photography is though difficult. Our brains are constantly readjusting the way our eyes see the world in colour. Normally people are not that aware of the way colour shifts from yellows to blue than back to yellows as the day passes, just as they are not aware of colour shifts when going indoors to a room lit by fluorescent tubes. Photographers are aware of colour shifts though because they have trained their eyes to see how film or digital chips record colour, just as photographers train their eyes to see the world in black and white if their final image is going to end up monochrome.  |
Colour is problematic in photography is both aesthetic and a question of whether the colour in a photograph is "real". Photographers have always been able to make decisions about how colours look in their work and that is where creativity and controversy start. Before digital, photographers chose the colour space that they liked by choice of film. Kodak, Agfa & Fuji engineered their films to have specific colour balances and therefore had different "feels". If photographers made prints they would work with skilled photo labs to produce the colours in the final prints that they wanted. Today we all use the virtual darkroom that is photoshop to control our colour content and this software is just the latest in a long history of image control systems . Colour has the the ability to describe emotions. We are all effected emotionally by colour shifts even if we are not aware of them. Blue hues still make us feel cold and red, the colour of blood, can still give us a sense of danger. Supermarkets use colour balanced lighting in their vegetable areas to make the food look fresher but few customers notice this. Photographers that make the colour photographs that "move us" use colour with as much precision as a painter does. Colour becomes an additional tool, along with texture and form, to allow photographers to communicate precisely with their audience. So it should now start to be clear how selective colour works. Selective colour photographs use black and white to describe form and texture in a direct way and the colour elements allow emotions to be communicated. In theory Selective colour gives the photographers a more precise ways to communicate and more ways to show and describe the world in new ways. Elements of the photo can be isolated and given meaning. When we look at the world we tend to concentrate on one thing at a time in our field of vision, the selective colour process allows us to highlight what we saw in the photo that we wanted to communicate. Post Modern Games For me Selective Colour is a perfect post modern process, if that is not a contradiction in terms. The process pastiches the modernist theories of "straight photography" in its black and white content and and Fauvism in its colour content. The mixing of the two is like collage or Pop Art. Crudely the process in like Ansel Adam meets Andy Warhol meets Matisse in 2011. Abstraction and contradictions in style and content have always been important in my work, selective colour allows me another way to examine the world. I have always been intrigued by people at play. This is maybe because I am not very good at leisure. My leisure is working. Working at exploring the world through new imagery. Down time from photography is photography. I have always been facinated by the power of photography to isolate a moment in time and give it an importance that it never had at the time. In photography the photograph always reveals something that I did not see at the time of taking it. That is not to say that I was not aware of what I was photographing otherwise I would not have pressed the shutter on the camera. It is to say that the subconcious side of my brain also has a say in when I press the camera shutter and it sees things differently to the concious side of my brain.  |
Relying on instinct and allowing my sub conscious to play a major role in taking my photography reveals a world where people relate to each other in a fascinating timeless space. It is almost as if the fraction of a second it took to expose the photo destroyed time all together. Narratives are set up between subjects that are ambiguous and potent. The world becomes a set of tableaux where we explore its occupants in limbo. Relationships are created that may never have existed. The margins of these photographs become important. A foot leaving frame may help the narrative or it may create another ambiguity. I love photographs that ask more questions than give answers and create a framework for my imagination to get lost in. Selective colour adds another layer to the narrative. Participants in the photo are isolated in colour which adds an abstraction. People in colour exist against a black and white modernist world which forces us to question the photo and what it communicates at an aesthetic and cultural level. I love black & white and colour photography but back & white can often get bogged down in its own pompousness and colour photos can often give so much information that there is no space for the mind to explore. For me used correctly selective colour is a powerful process that helps creates powerful images that explore our world in a new way. The art of communication in photography is illusive and complicated. It takes a lot of understanding and a lot of skill that is learnt from blood, sweat & tears. There is now a democracy in photography with professional photographers and hobbyists all using similar cameras and the same final process software. As more and more people decover the excitement and power of the photograph again they also realise how difficult it is to make meaningful photographs. The lesson that everyone is learning is the old maxim that we can all buy a Fender Strata Caster but it won't turn us into Jimmy Hendrix. See On Line Selective Colour Fine Art Photo Galleries of:
This Months Free eBook of Burano Photos
Day For Night - A New Series of fine art photos by Paul Williams
Day for night is a series of black & white high contrast photos by multi ward winning photographer Paul Williams. This is a series of stark black and white photos with landscapes and buildings sharp against nightime skies. The series of art photos has a strange abstract feel due to the fact that these photos that look as if they were taken at night were in fact taken in the daytime. Day for Night, the title of François Truffaut's 1973 film, is the old technique also known as also known as nuit américaine ("American night"). The cinematographic techniques used to simulate a night scene used tungsten-balanced rather than daylight-balanced film stock or with special blue filters and also under-exposing the shot (usually in post-production) to create the illusion of darkness or moonlight. Historically, infrared movie film was used to achieve an equivalent look with black and white film. Paul Williams uses his Day For Night technique to explore the daytime world and give it a ghostly moon lit atmosphere.
Unreliable Sightings - New Selective colour series of Fine art Photos by Paul Williams
Paul Williams continues his exploration of the world through this selective colour photos series. The series has no theme but is a collection of places and buildings as well as people.
Travel Photo Art Prints.
From Funkystock Photo we have access to a very large collection of photo art of European countries. Over the next year we will be assembling them into gallery collections but in the means time if you are looking for prints of European countries and landmarks please visit:
Food Photo Art Prints.
From The Stock Boutique we have 2 collections of lifestyle food photo art, so if its time to brighten up your kitchen or dining room look no further.
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Funky Stock Picture Library. 
