THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE

of white mat board) or flash fill (see
Appendix) to throw some additional
light onto your subject.
How do you achieve this? One way
is to be patient and hope that either
your subject moves or the light does.
Another way is to make sure that the
sun is behind you, so it is likely to be
shining on your subject. If you do
that and get up close, your subject
will generally appear brighter than
the background.
Sometimes you'll want to do just
the opposite of "spotlighting." A
shadowed or silhouetted subject can
occasionally stand out beautifully
from a brightly colored background.
The main thing you need to keep
in mind is that a color photograph is
almost always "about" color before
it is about anything else. The color
makes its impact first, and other
elements emerge more gradually. If
you don't control the color by deciding
how much of it gets into the
photo, then it will probably compete
with your subject, rather than enhancing
it.
Pow! or Subtle?
As you begin playing with color
themes and different palettes, you'll
also want to begin making decisions
about value. Value, as you may
recall, is the darkness or lightness of
color tones. In black-and-white
photography, value concerns the
range of grays. In color photography,
it essentially concerns the density of
color. If you underexpose a color
photo, you will intensify and darken
the values in it. You will increase their
density. If you overexpose it, you will
lighten and possibly weaken them,
reducing their density.
Most color photographers settle on
a value level that expresses the way
they see things, and then tend to stick
Eliot Porter. Frostbitten Apples, Tesuque, New Mexico, November 21,
1966. Dye-transfer photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York (Gift of Eliot Porter in honor of David H. McAlpin, 1979).
Color 241