Exercise 24: Control the Strength of Colour

This exercise require me to take five images on the same screen with different exposure. The exercise ask me to change the aperture, but changing aperture may change depth of field, so I much prefer changing shutter speed so that I can actually compare the colour. Anyway, this is just an exercise. I will do what I want in the assignment later on.


I did this exercise with some existing food I have at home. To make sure that I see the effect, I did more than moving the aperture by just half a stop. So from darkest to the brightest, I have the five below:

I notice that I prefer the image to be slightly overexposed than under-exposed. I am rather used to orange being being bright than dark, so an under-exposed, or even correctly exposed according to the meter image look less natural. Just to check this, I casually take three more shots at the supermarket.

Somehow, bright yellow just look more pleasing to the eye. Dull/darker yellow looks weird.

So from the last post, colour can be classified by three parameter: Hue, Saturation and Brightness. One would expect if you only increases brightness by changing the amount of incoming light (by making shutter speed longer or by a wider aperture), but visually the colour looks more vivid in the progress. In theory it should not be changing the pure-ness of the colour, which is the saturation.

I wonder if when I comment on the colour saturation, I was actually looking at brightness instead. I think the actual theory of colour is more complicated and it is probably a good idea to go look at other resources on this subject.