Purple and Yellow

In my last post, I posted a pic of my husband.  He had a gray and bright blue hoodie on and was leaning against some bright yellow dumpsters.

 I loved the way the colors worked in that picture.  Turns out, they work so well because blue and yellow are near opposites on the color wheel making them complimentary colors.  Technically the true opposite of blue is orange, but yellow was close enough.  Do you want to know what the true opposite of yellow is?  Purple!  So I decided to go back downtown with a focus on color.  My daughter, Dani, graciously sacrificed her precious time and became my model and what a lovely model she was.  She also happens to own a purple hoodie. 

It's rather fun to pay attention to color choices when framing a picture.  I also had a picture of Dani in front of a red-colored brick and while she looked adorable, my eyes just didn't like it.  Frankly, the mix of her purple hoodie and the reddish brick was considerably unpleasing to my eye and now, with my handy color wheel, I know why.  If I learned anything from this experiment it's that, while it might be too difficult to match what your subject wears with the background, if perchance, I have a subject wearing a certain color, and I see a background in the midst of a shoot that has a very complimentary color, I should use it and have fun with how colors play with each other.   OR....I could ask my client to bring lots of colorful clothing to a shoot so we can experiment!



And while the color experiment with Dani turned out great.  There are always a few shots that I can't resist turning black and white.  The shots below had no yellow in them, but her surroundings and composition were interesting and she was beyond beautiful and I wanted to isolate that.  What better way to isolate your intriguing background or the subject than to subtract color?