JPG: Stories: How To: Fun With Colors

How To

Fun With Colors

By Lacey R.

2 Feb 2009

I love taking pictures of flowers and my favorite flower is thegerber daisy. I love the flowers at our local Sam's Club and when I found these I couldn't resist picking them up to brighten my day. They ended up brightening our house while the flowers lived and now they brighten our home in the pictures that I took. To get these colors was a complete accident but it turned out wonderful.

Here's the story on what happened...

So I was trying to take pictures of these gorgeous gerber daisies that I had picked up. I had wanted some pictures for our hall bathroom so I was going to snap a few shots and be done with it.

I was using my Canon Rebel XTi with my standard 18-55mm lens. I had the camera set to full auto and automatic focus. I seriously was just aiming for a fast shot that would turn out for somthing to hang on the wall.

I was using my plain, off white wall as a background. I figured that I could change the color of my background later in Photoshop. But I kept getting this glare. I didn't want to turn off the flash, so I picked up my hand and put it in front of the flash to see if I could still get some light without the glare. At first I tried the back side of my hand, I'm pretty pale so I got the same color but no glare. I tried the palm of my hand (which is pretty pink) and then the pinker color appeared! I was so excited that I had done this. As I was getting excited, I got another idea...what about other things in front of the flash? I got different colored index cards and paper. I started trying the colors one by one. I then tried 2 pieces of paper put together and other colors appeared.

All of the pictures show with my story are in the same area on that plain wall. The only editing that was done was adding some fill light. These pictures got matted and framed to hang in our bathroom. Other people have also been pretty impressed and ordered their own prints.

I'm sure other people have tried this, but I thought I had figured something out.

Hope others try it and have some fun with it!

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Hi there!

thought you might like this submission to JPG Magazine. If you do, vote it up!

http://jpgmag.com/stories/10515

Thanks,
—The JPG team

3 responses

Ro Branch said (2 Feb 2009):
cool! i am going to try this asap......
Spectre Photo gave props (2 Feb 2009):
hey, very cool discovery!!
Kathryn Jeter gave props (2 Mar 2009):
Thats really awesome. I'm going to have to try!