Project 34: Black & White & Grey as Colours

This project required me to photograph a white, black & grey scene (or more than 1) and observe the effect of exposure on the colours and tones. As with the other colour projects (but not assignment 2) I have not been very exciting with the choice of subject, as the core focus of the project is on the colours.

In my white scene with the milk bottle on a white background, there was clear evidence of colour as the scene got darker, with blue tones in the background and yellow hues on the cloth that the milk bottle was resting on. I have often noticed yellow hues when I have taken scenes with a white background; I tend to correct those in Photoshop. The milk bottle itself seemed to get grey as the exposure got darker rather than coloured. I also photographed some white laundry which required overexposure to get rid of the grey. The classic white scene, which I have a lot of in my portfolio from recent months, is a snowy scene. The old adage is to dial in +2 i.e. "overexpose" by 2 stops as opposed to the light meter correct reading. However it was interesting how a lot of my snow shots looked blue, although I also used did some post editing to warm up some images by introducing some golden tones. Snow shots with all the colour removed seemed to look overexposed as there was too much glare.

For the black scene, I have fewer such examples from my archive (although owning a pet with black fur would probably give me some examples!). As anticipated, most of my shots showed grey rather than black. I did not see much colour in my "blacks" although my background was non reflective card. In order to get the black to be black would have caused loss of detail in the lenses, which were more pure black than the background. Correctly exposing a black scene is a technical skill I would like to master.

I wasn't totally sure about the project requirements for a grey scene, particularly as many black scenes that I took ended up to be grey. I have uploaded some examples.

The notes do refer to colour bias of films, which is not really applicable to digital, although white balance management is relevant. My experience has generally been to trust the camera to set the correct white balance, and any mishaps are easily corrected in Lightroom. Sometimes I change the WB settings to alter the mood of an image. Other such tricks include setting WB to "Cloudy" to enhance Autumnal landscape colours. My key learning outcome from this project has been to understand the difficulties of correctly exposing for white & black scenes, whereby the colours are kept pure but the detail is not lost, either in the highlights or shadows, as well as gaining some experience of spotting colour is supposedly neutral scenes.