Muted Colours

ONE OF MY HOBBYHORSES

I won’t write much about my activities last month. I was very busy with family celebrations, and alterations to the new flat (involving multiple trips to the tip, more to buy new stuff and hours of painting). The only things that have kept me approximately sane are my family and the repeats of ‘Round the Horne’ on Radio 4 Extra.*

But I have done a little more reworking of some old images. One of my favourite websites is The Online Photographer (http://www.theonlinephotographer.com/), although it doesn’t include much nature photography, the regular writers have some great insights into photography and the comments of the readers are well worth reading too. Mike Johnston, the site's editor (and a very experienced writer about photography), is proposing to publish a book of photographs contributed by members. It is intended that this will be a high quality production based loosely on the theme of muted colours.

I like this idea, indeed it is a hobbyhorse of mine. I do not like oversaturated images – maybe I don’t have saturated eyes or maybe my brain is already saturated by silly ideas. I distrust garish colours, is someone trying to dazzle me? Have they got something to hide?
Of course a shot a kingfisher or a tropical butterfly has to have saturated colours for the subject, but a plainer background is important too. I think that subtle colours encourage the brain to study an image and so to search out the details and nuances that it contains. Of course this is important in nature photography, but also in portraiture, street photography, architectural photography and so on.

Anyway, one evening while the paint was drying, I went back to my old files to find some favourite subtle colour shots which I could contribute. The first was one in my first blog post, a black-necked grebe in winter plumage as the sun was burning through the mist at Dawlish Warren. The only saturated colour is the red of its eye.

The second is a bull grey seal hauled out on the sandbar at Donna Nook NNR, Lincolnshire, just before the 2009 breeding season: the sand and the wind seem to be alien environment for him, but he looks totally contented. I love the way that seals' whiskers curl when they dry out completely.

In the end, I didn’t submit my third choice, which was taken in 2005 with my first digital camera (a D70). It is a young great crested grebe on one of the lodges at Moses Gate country park near Bolton. The remarkable pattern of ripples is entirely natural. The photo was taken as a front came in from the west, so that the sky behind me was bright, but the sky behind the grebe and overhead was a mass of dark clouds, and there was enough breeze to produce a few ripples. I do like this image, but I wish that the grebe was a little closer and that I had crouched to get a lower viewpoint. Because it was taken some time ago, it has a lower pixel count than the others and the quality is a little lower.

I don’t expect that either of my images will be selected for the final publication. I am absolutely sure that many better photographers will have submitted better images. But I feel that they are images which get much of their strength from their muted colours. And I like them.

I have lined up something new for tomorrow, so if things work out my next post will be a little different.

  

^*Rambling Sid Rumpo lives!

Note added 9th October, Mike has received over 2100 photos from 941 photographers. The resulting book should be really special.