The color purple
I have been driving one hundred miles a day this week, hauling OmegaDotter off to China Camp in Big City. Luckily, we hooked up with another local family sending their daughter to the same camp, and we’re splitting chauffeuring duties–I drive the girls in, A’s dad picks the girls up and drives them home. The girls seem to be enjoying the camp, and are learning lots of fun things and getting lots of “OMG, I’m not the only person in the room who looks like me” reassurance. But I have to say, getting up early and schlepping the girls into town, then hauling ass back home so I can log in to work is, frankly, wearing me out.
So I thought I’d put together a post on an interesting issue I am having with photography and our Olympus digicam.
While we were out on our (wonderful, relaxing, fun) road trip a week and a half ago, we encountered some lovely lupine clusters in the woods by the side of the road. I got close-up and personal with the lupines with my camera, expecting hoping for some gorgeous pictures.
Take a gander:
Isn’t that blue absolutely lovely? Isn’t it almost celestial? All those little slippers with those little purplish tips. Ahhhh. It’s breathtaking. I have done not one thing to this picture except to reduce the resolution so it works on the blog.
I’m not happy–even though I love that picture and find the blues delicious. Why?
The problem is that those lupines did not look like that to the nekkid eye, at all at all. They were not that lovely, heavenly, celestial blue with bits of purple on the tips. They were purple. Mostly. Even close up and personal, they were purple. After a great deal of fiddling around with color replacements, this is more like what they should look like. Sort of; it’s very fake-y because I used a lot of “replace color” and there are still some splashes that needed the color replaced but I had gotten tired of fiddling and the overall cast was similar enough to the real live flowers that it suited for this demonstration purpose.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered this problem; way back in late October, when the dotter decided she wanted to be a cheerleader for Halloween, I took a picture of her in a purple cheerleader costume–which ended up looking almost navy blue. No other colors behave this way with our Olympus digicam–just purples.
Anyone have any ideas as to (a) what causes this response and (b) what to do with the camera to avoid it?
(The roadsides around here are filled with purplish flowers. On one road, we have cascades of lupines. To the side of the highway in to Big City is a field overflowing with wild iris. The local streets have some type of lavender-purple bellflowers. I don’t want to be taking pics of all these things if I’m going to have to dick around inside my photo software to get some vague semblance of the real deal. Harrumph.)
posted in Flowers, Photography | 3 Comments
