Let's try light.

Okay, so can we agree that Rembrandt produced some of the most dramatic works of all the greta artists. He worked with a very limited palette. If we were to try to recreate his choices, they'd include; yellow ocher, burnt sienna, burnt umber, white, black, and a brownish or orangey red such as cadmium red deep.

What a good idea. Let's take just those colors and see what we can make of them. Yes, I do realize you are not Rembrandt and you don't want to paint like him, but why not try this exercise?

We forget how dependent we are on color and light to make our works dramatic. In photography, I often delete all of the color and replace it with a few of my own choosing. You'd be surprise how common objects suddenly become fascinating when all of the color has been taken from them.



Yes, that is a blade of common grass blowing in the wind we so frequently get 'round here and yes, I did take it on purpose. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but I took it so I'd have it when I finally grew a brain.

Turns out the nice folks at Roseburg staged a black and white show last year and while I didn't enter this image I thought about it and made up a working copy so that I could see what would happen if I made it a black and white.



Different isn't and to my eye it has a lot more drama and power. Of course I still haven't found what I am going to do with it and maybe I won't but doing the thing is a lot more important than using the thing.

Okay, I get it you are a realist and things just don't happen like that in Nature. They always have color. No, not really. Take the moon. I have shots of the moon when it was red and I have shots of the moon set in a bright, light blue sky. Single colors, they do happen in Nature, you just have to be there to catch them.

But to be reasonable, we get twilight every day, or almost every day when the sun doesn’t set at three o'clock. Oregon weather can some times take all the fun out of giving an example. Back to the point, twilight reduces the light spectrum and leaves us with a very limited color palette. Yes, it does, take a drive along Cape Arago at sunset. When I came home from the museum Thursday it was just as the last light fell off the horizon and all of the Bar was done in blue. It was like one giant Picasso and it was beautiful. Now all I have is a memory because I had just come from work and didn't have a camera with me, but I should have.

“Yeah, but that was just a freak of Nature, it'll never happen again.” Maybe and maybe not. One of the reasons why I take that drive is that the scene changes every hour of every day. I do not believe that it has been the same set of colors, clouds, waves or seasons since I moved here. And yes, I have had my camera with me when things went wildly dramatic. Never saw vermillion reeds? I did and you can have a look. Not all that many colors and yet it is a pretty spectacular view.

So try working with a limited set of colors for a while at the dawn of this new year. Maybe you'll want to toss them in the trash and go back to the full monty that you have always used and maybe you'll see something different.