I want to tell you a story about a photographer with an addiction to a colour….
I spent some time this week chatting with a photographer who is obsessed by green.
He’s a professional wedding photographer who takes ‘normal’ shots when he’s on the job but who in his spare time hunts down green things to photograph.
Green grass, green bottles, green lizards, green bottle tops, green anything and green everything.
It’s a bit of an odd obsession to have and when he told me about it I began to wonder whether he had ‘issues’ to deal with. In fact I almost wrote him off as a bit of a nut…. until…. he showed me his studio.
On entering the studio I felt my breath taken away. The walls were white (a very minimalistic look) and scattered around them were the most wonderful collection of large, vidid, bright green images.
I can’t actually show you his work as I didn’t have my camera with me (and I doubt he’d have let me photograph his photographs) but the images were of a similar ilk to the ones in this article.
His shots were of a large variety of different subjects – in fact they were a bizarre mix of genres of photography in the mix.
There were of course nature shots (as you’d expect with green) but there were many other images also including still life, macro shots, architectural shots (green buildings) and even portraits (don’t ask).
What struck me by the experience of entering his studio was the power of colour – especially the accumulation of the same colour in multiple shots in the one space.
Many of the images he’d taken really broke many of the rules of composition that we speak about on this site every day.
They ignored the rule of thirds and they had very few features or focal points – except for the one feature that drew them all together – their ‘greenness’.
I’m not suggesting that we each choose a Colour to obsess about but it struck me as an interesting exercise to experiment with for those of us who display our images in collections (whether that be in an album, at an exhibition, on a wall as a series or even online on a website).
Putting multiple images together with diverse subjects but the same colour is definitely an eye catcher and it evokes emotion in the viewers of the shots.
