Contrast #2 (or, Tone Music vs. Color Music)

I once had a painting teacher who felt that a picture can have either strong tone contrast or strong color contrast, but not both together, for best results (or, tone music and color music, as he liked to call it). Chiaroscuro works best with more monochrome palettes, and impressionism with almost primary colors. A scheme of warm and cool for shadows and light does bridge the two, but will excel at neither.

Using this thinking for fashion photography, clothes with big blocks of tone are a perfect candidate for black and white and strong light and shade.

And for bold prints or bold color blocking, better to stick with high-key lighting.

(http://benjaminkanarek.com)

As always though, this is art, not science, so sometimes photos can and do have both strong tone contrast and strong color contrast. But I do think the below example muddies the prints, and isn’t as effective at showcasing them.

In the end, however you decide to light and style it, try to make it sign out loud.

Contrast #1

Contrast. Such a simple word, and such a seemingly simple concept. Yet art is nothing if not an endless, endless quest for it. Light and dark. Warm and cool. Hard and soft. Smooth and rough. Big and small. Small and big. Organic and industrial. And on, and on, and on.

On a fundamental level, without some tone contrast, all you have is a solid color. Even Rothko varies his tones. And even if he didn’t, the viewing conditions would give it, at the very least, some slight contrast.

So contrast’s important, and I think about it a lot and always have a lot to say about it. But what made me think about it just now was this photo up on the Fashion Gone Rogue site:

A beautiful, simple portrait. But what jumped out at me was the contrast of those zippers against both the soft skin and against the soft quilt fabric of the jacket. I’m not saying it’s earth-shattering, but try to imagine the same photo, but without those zippers. Or with the zippers, but with a thick leather jacket. When I do, a completely different feeling comes to me.

Now maybe using a jacket with zippers wasn’t a conscious use of contrast, and maybe it shouldn’t and couldn’t have been conscious, but instead was a gut feeling (it is art, not science, after all). On the other hand, maybe it could have been conscious.
But however it happened, the subtly of the contrast here really helps (I hope) to amplify the illustration of what contrast can do for a picture.

How 1 + 1 can = 3

If you put two design elements in a photograph, you now have three things: the photograph itself, plus the two design elements.

Okay, so maybe the photograph itself is another design. The point is, though, that when you choose and arrange your elements for a photograph, you create something that's potentially much bigger than the sum of its parts. So choose wisely (but just not too wisely).