Reflecting on Color
While I consider photography to be one of my highest passions, it just wasn’t a huge priority the past year due to a hectic work and school schedule. It’s not where I’d like it to be in my life anyway. I have worked on simplifying things, which has helped. My gear is minimal these days and my photography niches are mainly live music, cars/bikes, and some urban landscapes. I’ve been doing mostly black and white work and I considered ditching color photography altogether as an ultimate act of simplification. In fact, I toyed with the idea of a New Year’s resolution to that effect — a year of black and white? As intriguing and tempting as that idea sounds, I didn’t commit to that this time around.
Recently, I picked up a book of Saul Leiter’s photographs and I have to say it has really changed my attitude toward color photography. The muted tones and deep contrast in many of his photos are quite appealing. Looking through his work was the kick in the pants I needed to look harder at my color photography and try a few things. While I’ve been looking for ways to minimize my gear and workflow, I’m not sure I want to be so specialized as to not work in color at all — at least for now.
My openness to color work and different ways of processing my images resulted in my creating my first photographs of the new year in color. On the final day of 2018, I took a drive through some back roads and visited a few small towns. In all honesty, my intention was to photograph in black and white. Actually, I went as far as setting my Fujifilm X100F set to the Acros film simulation, along with raw files being saved. The sky was mostly cloudy and the light was downright uninteresting to me. I’d rather have contrasty light with deep shadows for the kind of imagery I like to create. Despite tweaking the contrast of the black and white JPEG files in camera, the results were downright “meh”.
I could have pushed the files toward what I wanted in Lightroom but it was feeling too forced. Instead, I created a new set of images from the raw files in camera, using Classic Chrome instead of Acros. A bit of punch and tone was added to these in Lightroom, resulting in some contrasty color images with a bit of warm tone that defied the chilly climate of the day. While my heart was initially set on black and white, I liked what I came up with in the end.
I have played with window reflections before and I was particularly inspired by Saul Leiter’s work to dabble in this area again. I spent a bit of time photographing through glass or using the reflections on the glass to create some interesting dimensions. It was a fun exercise that helped generate a few creative sparks. The multiple layers in the images as created through the reflections resulted in a different way to think about my color imagery.
