Warm and cool colours

    One side of the colour wheel contains the warm colours-red, oranges and yellows-white the other side contains the cool colours-blues, violets and greens. Compare the photo of gondolas on a foggy morning with the photo of the blue boat-white the blue boat gives a feeling of serenity and calm, the image of the gondolas has more of a cold feel to it. Warm and cool colours behave very differently in an Image, and it’s important to be aware of this. The warm colours are dominant, and advance towards the viewer, while the cool colours are receding and do not demand attention.

     Even a very small amount of a dominant colour in a collection of cool colours will draw the eye, whether or not it was intended to be the subject of the photograph. So it’s particularly important to be aware of colours in the background of your main subject, even if it is thrown out of focus. Cool colours in the background to a warm-coloured subject will not cause any problem.

Colour combinations

The relation between dominant and receding colours needs to be considered when using pairs of complementary color contrast. For instance, a sunflower photograph with impact, as yellow and violet are complementary colours; but in a photograph of a mauve flower against a yellow background, although the same colour contrast is present, there will be a sense of visual imbalance because the subject is a receding colour while the background is a dominant one.    

Colourful reactions

    Colors have many different psychology or emotion connotations, some of which are culture related, such as the association of some colours with marriage and some of which are more universal, such as the association of green with nature and new life. Many colours have both good and bad associations-red, for instance, can represent aggression as well as warmth.   Similarly, blue can be thought of as serene but also cold. Compare the photo of gondolas on a foggy morning with the photo of the blue boat-white the blue boat gives a feeling of serenity and calm, the image of the gondolas has more of a cold feel to it.

Colour of emotion

    As well as behaving differently in terms of advancing or receding in an image, warm or cool colours also produce different emotional responses in the viewer. Reds, oranges and yellow are said to be energising, powerful, happy, and uplifting, whereas the blues and greens are restful, serene, calming and tranquil. Warm colours are thought to be more emotionally appealing, which is why they are used so much in advertising.      

Steve young’s say’s

Those earlier woodpecker-less visits hadn’t been wasted though, as there is always something to photograph if you walk quietly through woodland, or stand and soak up a place sometimes it may just be a foraging wren, other occasions may provide a singing robin, but on this occasion I was treated to a superb tree creeper building a nest in a crevice of a tree.

Ignoring the lenses of both birdwatchers and photographers, the busy parent came to the nest site on numerous occasions, carrying with is a bill full of bark, spider’s web, moss or various sizes of twigs with which to construct its summer home. At times, the tree creeper brought twigs that were too big for it to take into the tree crevice and, although it tried every which way to fit it into the gap, it just had to give up.