Colour ... sounds easy ... but ...
- Chris Hilton
- Jul 9, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 18, 2025
This coming season we have a competition based around our use of colour.
We are surrounded by colour, most of our photography is in colour; but how many of us really 'see' it? It is one of the basic ingredients in our image making but how much attention do we really pay to it?
First off, lets have a quick talk about genres ... some of us like to pin labels to ourselves, we call ourselves nature photographers, landscape photographers or street photographers, and whilst these labels do a good job at telegraphing our interests to others, they can also be restrictive. A few years back we had a 'Gothic' competition and we had a nature photographer leave the club with the parting shot of 'what can I do with that?' ... well, Hitchcock did a pretty good job at shooting birds and making them seem gothic ... it's about rising to the challenge and being open to the idea of visual exploring.
I'd like to point all of you, but particularly our nature photographers, towards the work of Rob Read and in this case, the wild art photography competition that he runs ...
Rob has done an astonishing job of inspiring people to raise their game and is just one of the interesting nature photographers that will be visiting the club in the coming season.
I'd also like to invite you to look at the colour work of Barry Lewis. A long time photographer, well published by the likes of Cafe Royal Books, who has often spent time after assignments to linger and photograph what he calls 'digital noise', these images in particular have a strong sense of colour.
Barry Lewis will be coming to the club in September, fresh from an exhibition about the worst polluted town in Europe hosted by King Charles at his farm in Romania ...
For those of you that like to photograph people and places, look at the work of Fred Herzog, Saul Leiter or Alex Webb ...
For those amongst us that like studio work or working with models, have a look at this stunning 'hat' collection from these two Hasselblad ambassadors ...
... and if all this seems daunting, well, here's an exercise for gently easing your way in ... try photographing in a single colour or palette, I find it helps to get your eye in (the examples below are from me) ... it's an exercise in reducing the amount of colour that you use, and once you've got it, you can start adding colour in a much more discernible way.
It is said that the difference between a photographer and an artist is that we start with a full canvas and try to reduce things down whereas an artist starts with a blank canvass and builds an image up ...
Try a blank canvas to start with, you never know what you might come up with ... and most importantly of all ... enjoy it, have fun and don't sweat about it too much.
See you next season ...
Chris Hilton
Programme Sec
