Opposites Attract
By David Cobb
The last week of January, I stepped out to photograph the first wildflowers to rise up on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge. After so many gray days, the splash of color lifted my mood.
Color was the first thing that attracted my eye in photography. When I walked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada in the 90s, my eyes and my trusty point-and-shoot seemed to be attracted to nothing but color. I guess that’s what started me with garden and flower photography in the first place.
So when I look for photographic possibilities, I tend to look for color and how those colors on the opposite ends of the color wheel attract each other. Whether it is a field of flowers or a sandstone arch against a blue Utah sky – I look for opposite colors to attract. Claude Monet said “Color owes its brightness to force of contrast rather than to its inherent qualities … primary colors look brightest when they are brought into contrast with their complementaries.” Look at a Monet painting and you’ll notice the cool tones in shadow next to the complementary warm ones in light. At Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France he intentionally had plants in the complementary scheme planted next to each other. It’s a good trick to use in photography as well. In this image of the Palouse at harvest time, I used a Singh-ray Gold-Blue filter to accentuate the colors and help those opposites attract.
When photographing flowers, it’s easy to find their opposite color on the color wheel. The two examples below feature poppies next to bachelor buttons, and a red poppy surrounded by green grass. The opposites help make each other pop.
The image below may be two boats, but what I was really thinking about was color. This was true as well with the grand landscape of Waimea Canyon on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The canyon image was less about the landscape to me and more about the interplay of those tropical greens and rich reds of the volcanic soil.
Sometimes the color just isn’t there in my images, so I paint it in later with Photoshop. The image below of Wahclella Falls in the Columbia River Gorge had some nice fall color, but it needed a little more. By going to my blue channel, I added more blue to the image and then hit: Edit>Fill>Black to bring the image back to its original form. With my brush tool, I then painted blue back into the basalt cliffs at about 6%. This subtle touch of blue gave the illusion of adding more pop to my yellows. Again, opposites attract.
Color is what brought me into photography, and it’s color that keeps me interested. By paying attention to what colors surround you and how that can be used to your advantage, you’ll become a better photographer.
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