From the course: Photography Foundations: Composition

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When to shoot color

When to shoot color

From the course: Photography Foundations: Composition

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When to shoot color

I've been asking you to shoot in black and white so far throughout this course, obviously in this chapter we're talking about color. But the reason I've been asking you to shoot black and white is because color can be confusing sometimes, it's difficult to compose with color. Color creates an extra layer of information for the viewer, and sometimes that's just more information than you need. As I said earlier, when you strip color out, you get down to really basic composition. But take a look at this, right now I'm standing here against a background that is a peach color. In black and white, the tone of the background and the tone of my skin are almost exactly the same, which means it's hard to get separation of me from the background. Tone is simply the brightness of a particular gray value. The brightness of my skin, the brightness of the back wall, they're about the same, and so I am kind of disappearing here into the wall. There are a couple of ways of dealing with this. In my…

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