Emotions, colours and photography

Last Updated on August 1, 2016 by Patrick

I mentioned in one article about the psychology of colours and their use in photography, but now I need to tackle the subject of tonality in photography.

I was returning from the photography store one day of April, in my city, and just outside my home I noticed these black tulips in the garden in front of my house and they kind of made me raise my camera and start shooting them. Their colours and presence seemed really attractive to me. I just felt like it was time to photograph them. Their beauty and presence was just amazing. They had a sort of character that inspired me to make their photo.

Now, more often the details are in the photograph, in the so-called negative that comes out of the camera. Including the starting point, they’re all there. What I mean by this is that the data in the file is there to manipulate it in order to fine tune the image to make it a work of art. If you have the right composition then everything else is just a matter of technique.

In this image that I made tonality plays a big part in showing the special character these garden flowers had. They were asking for a black and white.

The image is not something purely representational but rather something that conveys the emotions I had when I saw them. Their presence, character and the emotional state they drew me in is portrayed in the image in its mysterious tonality and contrast.

Now, talking about colours they really can diversify the world, they can add vibrance and difference to the perceptual world we live in. Their vibration is somewhat different than the vibration of black and white. People say that the latter are not colours but rather something else. I say they are the overbrightness and overcontrast of any colour or the essence of them. Black and white tonality represents light chromatically on just one trajectory with two opposite senses. Whereas colours are more of space effects, I think. They are aspects of the qualities of light and not the quantities of light.

One can divide a ray of light into seven basic colours and will see that they coexist combined together into “black and white”.

So the image is called “Black shinning” for just one reason: black can shine too. Meditate on the relationships between black and white, light and shadow, value and nonvalue! :)