Complementary Colours

You’ll find it easier to get colours to work together to produce a striking image if you understand the ‘colour wheel’ theory of harmonious and complementary colours. Harmonious colours lie close to each other on the colour wheel, and used together in a photograph they can produce very peaceful, beautiful images. Complementary colours are opposite each other on the colour wheel; they can clash in a very ugly fashion, but they can also produce striking contrasts and vivid, vibrant images. Once you start looking for harmonious and complementary colours, you’ll see many new ways of shooting familiar subjects and enhancing their properties.

The colours in this close-up shot gain their strength from the contrast between the blue and the orange (and red) paintwork; blue and orange are on opposite sides of the colour wheel.

Opposites attract

You’ll see from the illustration of a colour wheel that blue and orange are opposites, and they certainly produce a strong contrast in a photograph. They don’t often appear in combination in nature, however, but blue and yellow are virtually opposites, and you’ll get a striking contrast if you photograph a field of yellow oilseed rape blooms against a blue sky, as you probably know. Not all contrasts work so well, however; red and green are opposites on the colour wheel, but used together they can clash and create a discordant visual combination – you may have seen ads in which red type on a green background (or vice-versa) appears to ‘jiggle’.There’s another important factor in this theory of opposites: effective contrast comes not just from contrasting colours, but from contrasting brightness as well. This is why the blue/yellow combination is so striking; the two colours are very different in brightness, not just colour.

The discarded red toolbox in this shot of an old boat takes up a relatively small amount of the frame, but your eye goes straight to it; this is partly due to its positioning on a horizontal and vertical ‘third’.

Size isn’t important

A third way of creating contrast is by including different-sized areas of colour in a shot. Two complementary colours taking up an equal amount of the frame can simply ‘fight’ with each other, and produce an unsatisfactory image; however, if one colour is dominant, and the other occupies only a small part of the frame, you are, paradoxically, making the colour contrast stronger, not weaker. The two colours don’t have to be equal in prominence; indeed, a small subject can actually gain greater prominence. Remember, then, that contrasting colours don’t necessarily have to be identical in brightness, or the relative size of the area they take up, and that colour contrast can be enhanced by taking advantage of variations in these properties.

Composing boldly

Look for and photograph subjects with opposite colours, setting them up artificially if no ready-made compositions present themselves. The blue-yellow combination works well for reasons we’ve already explained, but try combining red and green, despite what we’ve said about clashing colours. You can do this, for example, with many bedding plant varieties; nasturtiums and geraniums have particularly vibrant red/orange tones, and contrasting green foliage. Try taking portraits of subjects wearing clothes that either contrast or harmonise with the background; this gives you a good opportunity to experiment with still life set-ups, as you’ll have precise control over both the colours and the arrangements of the objects within the frame. To create a nostalgic, antique look, for example, choose harmonising colours consisting of largely brown tones, with only a few extra colours that are close by on the colour wheel.

The two boats in this riverside shot have strong, saturated colours, but it’s the yellow boat on the right that really stands out, because its colour is almost opposite the blue of the sky on the colour wheel.