It's funny that some things seem hidden until they become obvious. I walk around Austin all the time and I expect that the colors I see on the sides of buildings, on business signage and logos and on all sorts of display advertising are universal. That if you went to London or Lima you'd see pretty much the same assortment of colors. But when I walked down a few streets in Chicago last week one of the things I noticed very much was how different the color choices are from Austin's. More pale blues. More subtle greens. Paler bricks. Softer stone facades. A profusion of mint green colors in various strengths. Less deep red. Fewer signs with contrasty yellows. And it all makes a difference.
Chicago, at least the parts that I saw, seems a generation older or more mature than Austin and it's reflected in the color choices everywhere. But some things are more universal. Women's leggings are generally the same deep black. Tattoos seem more color uniform; but I think you have to be a big, big fan to have the Chicago Cubs logo prominently tattooed on the back of your thigh... It's mostly the national chain stores and fast food restaurants that have colors in their trade dress that transcend locations and cities. Seeing the yellow arches of McDonalds in the context of local Chicago seemed familiar and at the same time a bit strange.
The other thing I noticed as a photographer is that in the center of Chicago is that every business, gallery or restaurant is compressed into a tighter space and has less room around it. Less "negative space." Texas, and Austin in particular, is so much newer. So much more spread out. Except in the very center of our downtown businesses are insulated from each other, framed by ample parking lots, never touching side by side. While in Chicago it almost seemed in some places that business had carved out some territory for themselves out of the side of a building. Directly adjacent with no space to spare with other businesses that had done the same thing. The streets are narrower and more crowded which changes the way a photographer interacts with the space. We get so comfortable with our local status quo that even little changes are more pronounced to our photographer's point of view.
Color choices can be very contemporary or they can be era defying. A lot depends on the demographic of a store, restaurant or gallery's customer demographic. Businesses that have survived for decades have a vested interest in maintaining their signature look or risk losing customers. New businesses ( which seem to come and go more rapidly in Austin ) can experiment more at the outset as they have no existing base to lose.
Every year design gurus and color intensive concerns "reveal" the popular colors of the year. Some interesting colors don't survive in consumer culture for more than the year of their announcement while others become mainstream. Light, neutral gray is a currently a popular color choice for new car exteriors. I see it everywhere now. In a year or two it will make the vehicle model seem dated and passé.
Red (PMS 185) circles back around every ten years. Various shades of green are "evergreen" for financial services companies. A banking concern called PNC uses a horrible combination of orange and blue that's so badly matched that when they bought out a bank chain here in Texas and used that nasty logo on stationary, direct mail and their branch signage the result was a profound exodus of customers in a very short time frame. Color really does matter though logic-titians does like to admit that we have big reactions to color.
Chicago's blue sky is different than Austin's. Less intensely saturated. The buildings are more demure in tone and less prone to flashy color display. But the result is that they seem to defy trends better and the overall effect is the perception of stability.
I like color and often photograph things just to see how the colors of objects or signage render in the digital space. On my monitor. And it's fun to find funky uses of color. I'm interested to know if anyone else pays attention to variations of color in their photography practices. It's the age old question of: "How can I be at all sure that all people see colors the same way I do?" The answer is that we'll probably never know.
One of the reasons I use certain cameras is that technical trade-offs give them greater color differentiation. More color discrimination which basically means finer and finer degrees of change in tone and hue. The trade-offs may be that the camera has to do more processing and so trades off speed of capture and file processing. Even when the underlying sensor is the same between brands it's the processing protocols that make many color and tone differences. This may be one reason why some cameras have better high ISO noise performance than others. One model is getting you multiple images quicker while another company might give you a more realistic and complex color palette by giving up speed and different performance parameters on the borders. It's a choice. Always a choice because technology is always a trade off between speed and accuracy. Just a few thoughts after a wonderfully engaging swim practice on a bright Saturday morning. Thoughts?
The Armored Bridge of Millennium Park in Chicago. Impervious to RPGs?
It is sinuous.
I was so tempted to slide down the exterior of the bridge but I didn't want to get lost...
World famous graphic designer captures yet another color anomaly on Wabash Ave.
Several colors in the above image that I saw repeated in various places throughout Chicago's downtown. So different from Austin. But a nice change for me.
The softer nature of the stone work color.
Another Saturday Spent Swimming, Writing and Avoiding the Chaos on the east end of our neighborhood. That would be the outdoor music festival for a couple hundred thousand "friends" in Austin's Zilker Park. And after the two weekends of a noisy and crowded concert (Austin City Limits Music Festival) the city of Austin will spend a quarter million dollars for a study with consultants to figure out what happened to the once healthy turf at the park which is now a giant field of raw dirt. And at the next rain will become a giant field of mud. Oh well, it's about as appealing to me as a concert of leaf blowers and chain saws. And we get enough of that...
And traffic is a mess everywhere. Staying here in the bubble. It's safer and saner that way.
3 comments:
Kirk: I like color and often photograph things just to see how the colors of objects or signage render in the digital space. . . . I'm interested to know if anyone else pays attention to variations of color in their photography practices.
I think of color as just another variable I can manipulate in post to get the image I want. I don’t worry overmuch about replicating the “real colors” of the subject, because (as you imply) the colors I think I see when I snap the shutter are simply the way my brain interprets the frequencies of light that reach my eyes at that particular moment. In other words, inherently subjective.
Having said that, imposing the palette of Austin on the buildings of Chicago might be a bit of a stretch even for me.
This is an interesting observation you bring up. I think one reason the sky might look a bit different is the latitude. Geography of the surrounding region is another. The buildings and architecture are (of course) another. The appearance will be determined by culture and available material. A lot of buildings in Vancouver are built out of wood — there are a lot of trees in the area. In Montreal they use brick, so the buildings look different. Murals on buildings seem to be common in Montreal. Less so in Vancouver.
Software can have an effect on how subjects look. I have more or less locked in the settings I use for Lightroom. Any differences in colors will be due to the subjects, not the software.
I'd never thought of the visual palette of cities, though I should have, coming from the Twin Cities -- St. Paul downtown is largely reddish-brown (bricks) and Minneapolis downtown, just a few miles away, is largely blue and silver (glass.) Santa Fe, where I live now, has both height restrictions on buildings, and appearance restrictions, trying to keep things "traditional." So, the city looks adobe brown, even when most of it isn't adobe. And it's brown. Brown is basically what I call "Not Very Interesting."
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