Photo Session transcript: all about colors, part 2

The photography class of Thursday was awesome. The gallery was full of attentive avatars. Zephyru used a lot of examples to support his class. For those of you who couldn’t attend, the essential of the talk is after the jump. Also, check out the photos on Koinup.

[11:11] zephyru Zapedzki: i will start to answering some questions of the last session

[11:11] zephyru Zapedzki: to Kee Llewellyn

[11:11] zephyru Zapedzki: – Kee Llewellyn: I’m sorry, but isn’t the colour wheel based on the primary colour system of red, yellow and blue rather than the additive colour system of red, green and blue?

[11:12] zephyru Zapedzki: yes Kee you are totally right, the color wheel behind me it based on the red, yellow and blue principle, not in the RGB principle as i mistakely said last session. im sorry for my mistake and thank you Kee for your attention and participation

[11:12] zephyru Zapedzki: the RGB its on this addictive system

[11:13] zephyru Zapedzki: you can take copy

[11:13] zephyru Zapedzki: of all the objects

[11:14] zephyru Zapedzki: it works better with a black background

[11:14] zephyru Zapedzki: ok i leave it here now

[11:15] zephyru Zapedzki: Kee also said – Kee Llewellyn: though technically, C,M and Y make all the colours in 4-colour printing. Black is only there to punch up the contrast. It doesn’t add any colour.

[11:15] zephyru Zapedzki: for the print process we need those 4 colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, considering black as a color yes for the darker prints, white is already there on the paper so we dont need white ink

[11:16] zephyru Zapedzki: many people dont consider black or white as colors, but i do, for example: when i go buy black oil paint i dont ask for a tube of non reflection light :) i ask for the black one or ivory black

like the white is the mix of all colors, but still a color for any practical definition

[11:16] zephyru Zapedzki: theres a complete conclusion of this point

[11:17] zephyru Zapedzki: its part of this great site i found, very complete for the color theme

http://www.colormatters.com/

[11:18] zephyru Zapedzki: you can add to your favourites and see it more deeply later

[11:18] zephyru Zapedzki: also answering to Sennaspirit Coronet – Sennaspirit Coronet: reflected light vs projected light yes?

[11:19] zephyru Zapedzki: in tv screen and monitors theres no reflected light but projected light yes, this link its good for a deeper understanding of this process

[11:19] zephyru Zapedzki: for Dermott McMahon question – Dermott McMahon: but isn’t color wheel applying to colors in general not to technology of display?

[11:20] zephyru Zapedzki: the most common color wheel is this one right behind me with the 3 primary colors (red, yellow, blue), but we can also have a color wheel for the RBG like

[11:22] zephyru Zapedzki: this session i will talk about colors in Art, in photography and in SL, and if we still have time we will go for the next lesson too,

the whole lesson’s plan its right behind me clicking the color wheel

[11:22] zephyru Zapedzki: colors can comunicate with us, causing us emotions, feelings, sending messages, as single color or in combination of 2 or more colors

[11:22] zephyru Zapedzki: for example the blue was often used for the walls to calm people in psychiatric rooms, the red can cause the opposite, and provoke excitement

[11:23] zephyru Zapedzki: in the oriental concept of harmony, Feng Shui, colors have also an important role for the the Ba Gua phylosophy, see this image

[11:24] zephyru Zapedzki: there is also the chromoterapy, using the 7 colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, lilac, violet) as the main 7 chakras, i found this site that have some basic information about the chromoterapy

[11:25] zephyru Zapedzki: colors are used in art as in decoration to create types of ambiance, like if you want to make some place looks warm you use hot colors like orange, red, yellow, even reddish browns

[11:25] zephyru Zapedzki: as you can see the on the color wheel behind me the warm colors and the cold colors (greens, blues)

[11:25] Vaneeesa Blaylock: On the color wheel,people always get confused between subtractive and additive colors… but actually… it is the SAME wheel for both – just inverted… SO for subtractive color R-Y-B are primary… and G-O-P are secondaries… BUT — that Green, Orange, Purple — they ARE the additive primiaries! Addtive “Blue” is close to purple, Red to Orange and Green-Green. And… the light secondaries, Cyan-Magenta-Yellow — those ARE the subtractive primaries — one reason that painters have trouble mixing is that they use R-Y-B, when the actually need M-Y-C — Subtractive “red” is a “magenta” color and subtractive blue is a “cyan” — hope that’s not confusing — but my point is — there aren’t TWO color wheels — it’s the same wheel… we just label some of the colors differently.

[11:27] zephyru Zapedzki: well Vanessa actually for me there only this color wheel behind me

[11:28] zephyru Zapedzki: this is the color wheel that always been there, since the big clash lol

[11:28] zephyru Zapedzki: the other its very recent anbd its only to justify this other light phenomenum

[11:28] zephyru Zapedzki: tv, screen

[11:29] zephyru Zapedzki: but in every color book or site we see ths two wheels

[11:30] zephyru Zapedzki: an example

[11:31] zephyru Zapedzki: colors has always be a great theme of discussion

[11:32] zephyru Zapedzki: and thats is very good

[11:32] Vaneeesa Blaylock: Don’t let me take you off your talk! But if you look at the two illustrations in your web example, except for the “flashlights and paint brushes” — LOOK at the colors — they’re the same 6 color in both diagrams! It’s one system! We just look at it from two different points of view. :)

[11:33] zephyru Zapedzki: yes vanessa im trying to find a link i have in my fav. that have just only one wheel with the two sistems

[11:35] zephyru Zapedzki: also in general visual arts this colors characteristics are important tools to catch the eye or provoke sensations, emotions, like light colors for softness and happyness or dark colors for a “heavy” ambiance, sadness, mystery

[11:36] zephyru Zapedzki: found it

[11:37] zephyru Zapedzki: as i told you in the last session, one of the most used tricks to catch the eye with colors in visual art is the use of complementary colors, on the wheel here we can see them, its a pair of colors that are in opposite of each other, like we have the red/green or the blue/orange

[11:38] zephyru Zapedzki: this trick works because if you put red next to green, this two colors will get more vibrations to our eyes, try also with the orange or yellow next to blue

[11:39] zephyru Zapedzki: so colors has been used in visual art since the rupestre paintings in the pre-historic caves, with a limited pallet for sure, often charcoal mixed with spit or animal fat and carbon black or ochre

[11:40] zephyru Zapedzki: then later man used a big variety of elements to produce his pigments (for the paint), from minerals, vegetals and animals, grinding the components till get the pigments (almost dust) mixing with the vehicle and testing their durability, mixability among others properties

[11:40] zephyru Zapedzki: only after the industrial revolution near the 19th century we knew the synthetic pigments for the colors, and painters got their pallets much more rich

[11:41] zephyru Zapedzki: and now i guess we all are living in the pixels era

[11:41] zephyru Zapedzki: what will come next?

[11:41] zephyru Zapedzki: no idea

[11:41] zephyru Zapedzki: do you?

[11:41] Talia Tokugawa: Holograms…

[11:42] zephyru Zapedzki: maybe something with the holography

[11:42] zephyru Zapedzki: yes

[11:42] Talia Tokugawa: extended vision…. into ultraviolent and infra red…

[11:42] Talia Tokugawa: magnetism…

[11:42] zephyru Zapedzki: and then teleportation

[11:42] Talia Tokugawa: hehehe magnetic “vision” is already possible.

[11:43] zephyru Zapedzki: well i still use pigments on my RL paintings :)

[11:43] Natty Foggarty: so we wil lsee the worl in different colors maybe

[11:44] zephyru Zapedzki: different lights :)

[11:44] Talia Tokugawa: http://wiki.bmezine.com/index.php/Magnetic_Implant

[11:45] zephyru Zapedzki: now i would like to share with you some old famous art works, where we can see a master use of the color and the colors combinations or schemes that we talked last lesson and you can re-check with this cool link to experience color schemes and test color combinations http://colorschemedesigner.com/

[11:46] zephyru Zapedzki: the 6 circles are the combinations

[11:46] zephyru Zapedzki: then clike in the color wheel

[11:47] zephyru Zapedzki: we will start to see some paintings and then some photographies

the works i like to suggest to our apreciation for painters will start with Henri Matisse and André Derain, fathers of the 100 years old Fauvism which is a painting movement centered in the strenght of the colors, just like other visual art movements (for example Color Field painting that is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s)

[11:50] zephyru Zapedzki: so this two painters, among many others, are known as masters of color, lets see this example of Matisse “Music” from 1939, its a simple painting but see how Matisse really uses the complementary colors to catch our eyes (the red with green and the blue with orange/yellow)

[11:51] zephyru Zapedzki: and this from André Derain – “The Turning Road” its really memorable to our eyes, on my right

[11:51] zephyru Zapedzki: warm painting

[11:52] zephyru Zapedzki: on this Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with red, blue, yellow and black” 1921, we see the 3 primary colors in their pure basic form, this was the base colors for the Neoplasticism (De Stijl), red, yellow, blue and also the black, grey and white as values (but also colors)

[11:54] zephyru Zapedzki: another example i want to show its this Rococo era amazing Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting, “The Swing” 1767, we can see almost all the painting is green (cold color) but at the center we have a precious amount of hot colors (pink/rose) this makes an equilibrium for our eyes and sensitivity

[11:55] zephyru Zapedzki: but we can see how monochromatic works are amazing too, this is a great example: Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending Staicase” 1912, we can see how nice this family colors fading work together creating movement, from the darker browns to the almost whites and yellows, there is like an hue and we can say this is genericaly a brown painting

[11:57] zephyru Zapedzki: my t-shirt is another example

[11:57] zephyru Zapedzki: do you recognize it?

[11:57] zephyru Zapedzki: the blue period of Picasso

[11:58] zephyru Zapedzki: so this was to show how important color is in visual art

[11:58] zephyru Zapedzki: there was more than 100 examples of paintings i would like to show you and discuss under the color theme because i think they are very important, but i will just say some great names like Titian, Paul Cezanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Andrew Wyeth, Kazimir Malevich, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Turner, Van Gogh, Rudolph Hausner, Francis Bacon, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Harnett, Ivan Aivazovski, Tamara de Lempicka

[11:58] Talia Tokugawa: heheh would visual art be visual art with out colour?

[11:58] zephyru Zapedzki: good question

[11:59] zephyru Zapedzki: a blind man could answer

[11:59] zephyru Zapedzki: i cant

[12:00] zephyru Zapedzki: art its not what we see, its much also what we feel

[12:00] zephyru Zapedzki: well but we better go for the photography now :)

[12:00] Talia Tokugawa: well surely “visual” art is kinda reliant on what we see

[12:01] Talia Tokugawa: what we see makes us feel which is the art…

[12:01] zephyru Zapedzki: i think it can be enriching and interesting for you all if you have the curiosity to see these artists’s famous works that I mentioned as soon you have the time, its good to training the eye and for a better art perception, not only focused on the use of colors, but also in the other all important topics: like theme, elements, composition, light/shadow, movement, etc

[12:02] zephyru Zapedzki: in photography you can have those schemes/combinations or color “rules” too

in my opinion, we can handle color in paintings as in photography, the final image’s result its what matters, and in the final result you have colors in harmonious combinations (or not), but colors have their important presence on the image, even in the black and white photography the colors (light) define the tones of the greys. This all works for art photography or documental photography (journalism, science, etc), and obviously in SL photography too

[12:03] zephyru Zapedzki: now i would like to show you some amazing RL photographic works of famous photographers, some very recent photos, some from the mid 20th century, where we can see the master use of colors in photography, just like classic painters

[12:05] zephyru Zapedzki: this is an amazing photo, the equelibruim of everything, even the clouds seems to match in format the wave’s foam

[12:06] Talia Tokugawa: who is it?

[12:06] zephyru Zapedzki: this is a photo from Ernst Hass – Tobago – 1968

[12:06] zephyru Zapedzki: famous photographer

[12:11] Kali Meads: is that andr filter or photoshop?

[12:11] Kali Meads: an NDR filter even

[12:11] Kali Meads: or what filter is that

[12:11] zephyru Zapedzki: maybe have some work on it yes

[12:12] zephyru Zapedzki: now another style…

[12:12] zephyru Zapedzki: this one is from Olivia Parker – 2001

[12:13] zephyru Zapedzki: a photo can be much more than what we only see

[12:17] zephyru Zapedzki: this is from the famous Ernst Haas too – Black Wave – 1966

[12:17] zephyru Zapedzki: in an abstractal style

[12:17] zephyru Zapedzki: doenst look lkme what it is

[12:18] zephyru Zapedzki: simple and lovely

[12:18] zephyru Zapedzki: Ernst have great color photos too

[12:22] Ao Heartsdale: Pete Turner punches up the saturation as a regular technique

[12:23] zephyru Zapedzki: a still life from the great Pete Turner – Baja Spheres

[12:25] Ao Heartsdale: He’s a National Geographic photographer

[12:26] zephyru Zapedzki: this one with a perspective, often used in photographies

[12:27] zephyru Zapedzki: sometimes composing abstracts when in detailed

[12:29] zephyru Zapedzki: this one is from Laurie Frankel – Salt & Pepper – 2009 winner too

[12:29] zephyru Zapedzki: see the contrast green/red (complementary colors)

[12:29] zephyru Zapedzki: simple but great work

[12:30] zephyru Zapedzki: the composition works very good

[12:32] zephyru Zapedzki: from a famous man, Richard Avendon – Beatles – 1967

[12:33] zephyru Zapedzki: the last one

[12:35] zephyru Zapedzki: George Logan – Qantas, Emu – 2009

[12:35] zephyru Zapedzki: this is an example of the photo in the right time

[12:35] zephyru Zapedzki: a funny example yes

[12:36] zephyru Zapedzki: this winners photos, I took them from one Photography Masters Cup

[12:36] zephyru Zapedzki: its very good to us can see all this winners and nominees, professionals and amateurs photographers, see the variousity of categories on the left at the main site page.

[12:37] zephyru Zapedzki: there are much more well known photographers that i sugest you to see their work, but they do like 99% B&W (black and white) photography, so since this is a color lesson, and even knowing there is colors behind a B&W photograph, i decided to not upload their works, but im sure you will love to see their amazing photographies on the net, so i leave you this names, some are really very well known:

the famous surrealism and portraits of Man Ray; Rolph Gobbits and the use of scenary; Ruth Bernhard from simple still lifes to complex nudes; Yousuf Karsh and the classic portrait;

[12:38] zephyru Zapedzki: Henri Cartier-Bresson photojournalism, where you need to find the right moment to click; Frank Hurley, which was criticised on the grounds that his use of staged scenes, composites and photographic manipulation it diminished the documentary value of his work; Bill Brandt and his amazing skills on shape and light/shadow; Lee Friedlander, a terrific city life witness; AAron Siskind and Harry Callahan, not only but great abstract photography; and finally the great Andre Kertesz and the great Jerry Uelsmann (surrealism) are definitly two of my favourites photographers of all time

[12:38] zephyru Zapedzki: you can easily find these masters’s works online, try their names on google images

[12:38] zephyru Zapedzki: this is funny, we are having a color session for photography but all my favourite photographers do almost only b&w photography :)

well I must confess I love old b&w and sepia photography and Daguerreotypes too. That can be seen in some of my paintings.

[12:39] zephyru Zapedzki: in SL we have endless colors as we know, when we build we can make the prims get any color that we want, using the texture tag, and then the color picker window by cliking in color, in this window we see the RGB (red, green, blue) light color system and the Hue, Saturation, Luminosity to make exactly the color that you want.

and we also can upload an image to SL and replace the texture with that RL image as we wish, also transparency can be a very cool tool for overplacements

[12:40] zephyru Zapedzki: as i said on the first lesson, light is color and color is light, one can’t live without the other

like the Ambrose Bierce’s definition for a photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art

now i think its up to us to find where it is the photographies that sun painted, and take our snapshots to make that unknown “painting” find immortality

[12:40] zephyru Zapedzki: and in SL thats the same ideal, with the big diference that you are also the sun (the light), you can command the sun in SL

[12:41] zephyru Zapedzki: and one of the amazing things in SL is that we can have that also here, because here we can create light too!

in SL everyone is a little God, creating trees, mountains, rivers, skies, clouds, day/night, avatars, clothes, anything you want to for the best snapshot, and the most important for this lesson; the light

creating lights can really make a difference on a photo, no matter if its landscape, portraits, still life, abstract or macro.

[12:41] zephyru Zapedzki: thats the end of today session :)

June 14, 2009 at 11:00 am | Uncategorized | 2 comments

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