Today I wanted to tell you about the image that Felix and I chose for the front cover of Colour at Work – our exciting brand new book about colour, which is now available to pre-order, with free worldwide shipping (for a very limited time).
Some of you may not have realised that our colourful cover is a photograph, which was taken by Tom, at a specific time and in a very specific place. It is a beautiful image, and it is a picture of something. But what is that something? Here’s Tom to explain.
“This photo was taken near Ruisgarry in Berneray. We had arrived on the island earlier that day and were looking forward to a relaxing break after a frantic few weeks earlier shipping out our West Highland Way books and preparing Ootlier 2 for printing. We had wonderful weather on the trip over and as the evening approached I headed out with my camera to explore my surroundings. I found an elevated spot with views over Berneray’s west beach, and beyond to the Atlantic.”
It was a beautiful spring evening and the sun had set just after 8pm.
I’d taken some “normal” photos over the sea and the colours were really beautiful – fiery oranges and yellows in the wispy clouds.
The light had begun to fade, so I decided to head back home. But as the sun disappeared over the horizon and the light faded the colours took on more complex unusual and muted tones – not those you might typically associate with a sunset. So I stopped, and tried to make a series of images to capture this colourful palette.
As there wasn’t much light at this point, I had to use a longer exposure to capture enough light to make the image – leaving the camera shutter open for 3 seconds. Around that time, I was enjoying experimenting with using camera movement during long exposures to achieve an abstract, painterly effect – smearing and mixing the light, like paint, across the camera sensor.
Using a long lens (600mm) I zoomed in on the area I wanted to capture and composed the shot so that there were four distinct zones in the frame; the dark surrounding farmland in the foreground, the shimmering green-blue sea and pinky-purple low clouds in the middle and the last scattering of orange sunlight in the high wispy clouds. I hit the shutter release and slowly rotated the camera left, then right, gathering all the available light for those 3 seconds. By combining a long exposure with camera movement, the image became painterly and abstract.
The subject of this photograph, then, is the quality, colour and intensity of the light, rather than the specific details of the scene. And I feel that this abstraction, this focus on colour and light presents a different kind of picture of that April night – one which speaks to the experience rather than the “view.” When I see this image, I can feel the cool Hebridean night air, hear the distant sea and remember my feelings of peace as the sky darkened and I turned to head home.”
So why did we choose Tom’s photograph? Well, we felt that its distinctive combination of material reality and abstract representation really gets to the heart of Colour at Work, capturing, in a single colourful image the essence of what makes our book rather different to other titles in its field. If you’ve got any books about colour on your bookshelf, you might notice that they tend to be rather discipline specific, exploring philosophical and intellectual concepts on the one hand or specific material practices on the other. Our book doesn’t draw such disciplinary boundaries, taking a much more expansive, in the round approach, bringing together thinking and making, creative representations and cultural contexts, critical ideas and practical activities. Just like Tom’s photograph, in other words, Colour at Work unites the abstract and the material, the palpable and the conceptual, exploring, in twenty beautifully illustrated essays how colour defines the world, and how we, in our turn, can make the world more colourful through the creative work of our own hands.
Thanks for this beautiful, suggestive photograph, Tom!
Colour at Work is now availble to pre-order (with free worldwide shipping)
I am moved by this beautiful photograph and my pleasure in it is enriched by the written explication. Thank you for both.
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I am currently in Ukraine, volunteering to provide trauma support. I got to take a break, and immerse myself in this post, full of color, detail, and joy. Thank you. What stands out to me most, reading about how the cover photo was created, is that reality is not a static image. The way that light, motion, and colour are combined makes both the crystal clear photo of a landscape, and the liquid melding of those details equally real, and equally beautiful. Again, thank you!
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all power to you, in your support work, Leanna x
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It really is incredible.
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Extremely interesting explanation of the photo and the process used to create it
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I appreciated learning about how the image was made.
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It’s a Rothko painting in photograph form!
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Tom, I have admired so many of your photographic offerings. I have been channeling them into my first year of painting, in watercolour. I am working on the essentials – washes and your post will help me finish a painting of a city park landscape winter landscape at dusk with a hint of the setting sun, and an old-fashioned lantern gently lighting a late afternoon park bench amidst bare branched trees. The lighting combination of those elements has presented all sort of challenges way beyond my fledgling attempts, but it’s a lot of fun.
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I love Tom’s photos of this style. They’ve really changed how I look at capturing my own landscape, capturing a feeling rather than framing an object. I have my own cheater version, taking pictures through the frost on the window.
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The image is so beautiful, and even more so knowing how Tom achieved it.
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I so agree, Beverlee.
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