Composing With Colour

Occasionally an image is all about the colour, some things are so stunning simply because of the colour that they demand you make an image. One  of the most photographed lakes in the world is Peyto Lake in Banff National Park, Canada. It is easy to see why, the vivid blue jumps out of the landscape like a beacon and the blue fingers running across the glacier that feeds the lake lead back to several waterfalls in the distant valley.

The whole location is breathtaking, but every single person who sees this lake is left with one enduring memory, the incredible striking colour of that spectacular lake. ​

Without colour some images just don't work, think of the time of day photographers like to shoot,  'The Golden Hour' or 'The Blue Hour' that's sunrise, sunset and the time just before sunrise or just after sunset. That's is mainly due to the wonderful light you get at that time of day. As you can see, the image below is far less interesting without the beautiful sunset colouring the lower cloud formation, a change which took just minutes, right place right time is certainly a factor too.  

Colours can be complimentary, passive, active, warm or cool and can really help you capture the feeling you wish to convey in your image. Complimentary colours are those that sit opposite each other on the colour wheel and effectively 'cancel out' the dominance of each other in your image. So red-green, purple - yellow and blue-orange are all complementary pairs 

The Fargo theatre in North Dakota understands the red/green combination

Perhaps the most obvious of blue/orange combinations

The Chicago skyline provides enough purple and yellow to show how they work together.

Orange, yellows and reds are warm colours and even if the image is an extreme close up, the colour alone will bring warmth to it without any wider view or understanding of location etc. The shots in the gallery below show how warm colours can even bring warmth to snow covered ground.  

The opposite of the warm reds and yellows are blues and greys which bring coolness your images, perhaps this is why (as mentioned earlier on this page) opposites on the colour wheel are so attractive to us.

In the following image of the Calgary skyline the lights of the highway in the foreground of the image outweigh the cool blues beyond giving the image a warm feel overall. It was in fact -20 and shockingly cold when I made this shot in January 2016. The shot also shows how the balance of blue and yellow  brings an overall pleasing aesthetic to the image. 

You can use colour to make an image 'pop' by minimising the colours in the frame to emphasize one particular part of the image. It's true that the selective colour technique of making everything black and white and leaving just one item of colour 'got old' very quickly, but you can achieve a similar effect using isolation of colours as seen in the gallery below.   

You can also use differing shades of the same colour across your images to bring a subdued common theme to the whole shot, this works well with family portraiture as can be seen in the first image in the gallery below, but try to get a wide variation in tone to prevent the 'all in the same shirt'  look that can occur.

Colour balance is something else to consider with your composition, if you have a very bright splash of one colour it will dominate the frame but you can reduce the impact of that by including smaller elements of the same or similar colours to balance the shot as seen in the gallery below. 

This large lantern is balanced by the smaller ones behind

The weight of the bright uniform on the palace guard is balanced by the long red ground along the lower frame

The heavy phone boxes on the right of frame are delicately balanced by the small red sign on the left

We could talk about colour as part of composition in much greater depth because it is such a large topic but this series is about basic composition so we'll leave it at that for now. Suffice to say the colours in the scene can be very important to the overall aesthetic, it's also important to note that colour, like many other things can be overdone, then nobody is happy.