Landscape Photography and Colors
Anyone who loves wildlife, nature or landscape photography should understand the importance of the role of colors. Quite a lot of photographers have almost no training in the theory of colors. This could have an impact on their skills since without the understanding of the physiological as well as psychological base of the color theory it would not be possible to understand how photographs can be stunning.
The Primary Colors
There are three main categories of the primary colors:
- YRB- yellow, red and blue
- CMY- cyan, magenta and yellow
- RGB- red, blue and green
The RGB colors are used in the electronic and transmissive-light technologies like film and television and the CMY colors are used in the reflected light technologies. Those who have attended art schools are generally familiar with YRB colors.
The First Order Colors
The first order colors are YRB since these are pure colors. YRB colors can be mixed with any other color in the spectrum. Yellow psychologically denotes happiness and is the brightest color in the spectrum.
The Second Order Colors
The second order colors are the ones which are created by mixing the primary colors with other colors.
- Blue-green
- Green
- Orange
- Yellow
- Yellow-orange
- Red
- Red-orange
- Red-violet
- Violet
- Blue-violet
Orange is formed when yellow and red are mixed. Orange has a wide range of tones. Green is achieved by mixing yellow and blue. Like orange, green too has plenty of shades and tones. Green is the color of vegetations and is widely used in all types of landscape photography.
Violet is formed by mixing blue and red. Violet is generally associated with luxury and royalty and brings a feeling of elegance.
Harmonizing Colors
The color circle provides us harmonizing colors. In order to find them, we have to visualize the three points of an isosceles triangle which are situated at the center of circle. When you do this, 2 or 3 colors would be apart by one color zone and the third color would be at the opposite end of the isosceles triangle. When you mix the harmonizing colors, you would get gray which is known as the most neutral color.