I managed to take most of the images while away for a few days in Cornwall - as mentioned in learning log, am getting accustomed to looking ahead; this generally means at least half the images I need have been taken by the time I get to the exercise. In this case only needed to add the orange.
The exercise notes suggested taking 3 exposures - one as camera meter suggests, one half a stop brighter and one half a stop darker. I found this was not enough on the Canon 450D so went for a full stop each way.
I deliberately chose to take a range of artificial and natural subjects.
Each of the set of images below is ordered overexposed, median exposure, underexposed.
The first primary colour is blue. This image was taken of the sky above Wembley on FA Cup Final day.
Blue is the darkest of the three primaries; this is apparent in the above images - even the brightest is not very bright (compared, say, to yellow below). Sky seemed a very obvious candidate for blue with added benefit in this case of some interest with the aircraft lines and clouds. The only slight downside is that the colour is not solid with some gradation in the picture.
Which is closest to the blue in the circle? Well actually none of them as my eye finds the blue in the circle to be impure, more of a dark violet. Probably the darkest is closest.
Yellow was an artificial colour - a pile of fishermen's crates at Polperro.
Possibly because these were a fairly dark yellow, the closest of the above images to the circle yellow is the brightest. This does emphasise that in practice we are presented with colours that may be anywhere on a wide range of brightness.
I took the entrance door to Looe fire station for red.
I noticed with the post box in the first exercise that red changes hue with brightness and this is evident here, with the brightest image being nearly orange, and the darkest almost a burgundy. The median exposure is clearly the nearest to circle red.
Turning to the secondary colours, I chose an avenue of trees shot in Brasov for green
The closest green to the circle green is again the median.
For orange, I chose a close up of a chrysanthemum.
The additional notes refer to the fact that photographers mainly have to deal with found colours, i.e. those that occur in the real world - artists have to concern themselves less with this phenomenon as they can choose pure colours on their palette. This is a good example of found colours - the orange is a pleasant colour but has areas on the tips of the petals of a different hue, where the orange becomes more of a broken colour.
To my eye, the brightest image is by far the most preferable as it gives off the radiance associated with the colour, but the orange in the darkest is actually the closest to the circle colour.
As other blogs have mentioned, violet is the most difficult of the six colours to find. I saw an opportunity with a child's coat hung on a buggy.
The brightest violet looks more overexposed than any of the other brightest images - perhaps not surprising as violet is the darkest of the six colours on Goethe's scale. The overexposure seems quickly to reduce the saturation.
Both the median and darkest images are reasonably close to the violet in the circle, probably the darkest is slightly closer.
An interesting and quite challenging exercise. It cements the concept that the degree of hue is affected by brightness and helps to emphasise the need generally to judge on a very specific basis - there is no general them that can be adduced from this exercise. I generally shoot half a point underexposed when outside in bright light ans experience has shown this mitigates against burnt out areas; this exercise supports that practice for the darker colours (blue and violet) but not the brightest (yellow and orange, for both of which the brightest exposed image looked best).
