Pixiq

With autumn days approaching, yellow was a natural choice for my fourth post about Nature's Colors. Whilst green is the dominant color in  temperate landscapes, large swathes of yellow also appear when deciduous trees change color in the autumn.

Also when massed plants come into flower, such as Californian poppies, buttercups or South African daises they can create large blocks of yellow. The color is more uniform on sunny days when the petals open out completely and the scene is viewed from an elevated viewpoint. Sunflower heads track the sun and so make the greatest impact at ground level looking into the flowers set against a blue sky.

Where vast numbers of bulbs are planted, as in Dutch bulb fields, and  yellow bulbs – daffodils or tulips – flower alongside red tulips, vivid blocks of color appear. On an even grander scale, huge fields of flowering rape or canola appear as large swathes of yellow when viewed from the air. To some people, this is indeed the rape of the landscape – although I suspect the Impressionists would have reveled in the impact of this striking contrasting color splashed across the ground.

The Italian landscape photographer  Franco Fontana is best known for his minimalist abstract landscapes incorporating saturated blocks of color from fields of bare soil, flowers or wheat. These are taken by using just three lenses – a prime 14mm, a 17–35mm zoom, and a 35–350mm.

Like yellow, gold is a warm color that evokes a bight and cheerful mood.  As the days shorten and the sun moves through a progressively lower arc, so the light casts longer shadows on the landscape. Also, for a brief time each day, if not blocked by clouds, the rising and setting sun paints the landscape with a glorious golden glow – perfect for introducing color to a silhouette shot.

Yellow plants

With the days shortening as autumn approaches in the northern hemisphere, this is the season for a plethora of yellow subjects: most of the golden cornfields are already harvested, but sunflowers and coneflowers linger on as squashes, and pumpkins ripen before autumn tints begin to develop. From the time leaves unfurl on deciduous trees, the green chlorophyll masks the colors of other pigments. As summer turns to autumn, the days shorten and lower light levels slow down the production of chlorophyll, so the green color fades from the leaves. The best  yellow fall colors develop when warm sunny days alternate with freezing nights, allowing yellow carotenoid pigments to produce the glorious golden maples and aspens that set off adjacent dark evergreen conifers to perfection.

Many fruits of plants we eat are yellow when ripe: Maize, lemons, bananas, butternut squash, pumpkin, cantaloupe melons, papayas, mangoes and pineapples.  Instead of always filling the frame with yellow, vary the approach by looking for dual-toned compositions such as golden cornfields or lemons contrasting against a blue sky and variegated squashes with random green splashes interspersed with yellow.

Yellow Animals

Yellow animals can be found amongst birds, tropical marine fish and many insects. Yellow butterflies live in both temperate and tropical regions.  In addition to sipping nectar from flowers, butterflies in general are attracted to muddy areas such as river margins and trackside pools as well as wet soil, dung and carrion to extract mineral salts. Known as mud-puddling, in the tropics large numbers of different kinds of butterflies – including yellow ones – can congregate using their proboscis to extract nutrient salts. 

Animals which are poisonous (arrow poison frogs), which sting (wasps) or which produce a toxic secretion (fire salamander) display a yellow/black warning coloration as a signal to potential predators to leave them well alone. 

Photographing Yellow

A random web search for exposing yellow subjects turned up two completely contrary beliefs!

1) 'Yellow & white flowers can be tricky to photograph (especially on bright sunny days). These colours tend to overexpose easily. One trick that I have found for better results is to try to photograph them in the shade.'

2) 'I don't shoot very yellow subjects often, but they seem to get underexposed.'

The truth is that bright yellow reflects more light than an averaged tone 18% gray card, green grass or matt green leaves – although not so much as white. This means that using an uncorrected TTL in-camera reading will result in dingy looking yellows that are underexposed.  Essentially, you need to open up on the metered reading.  This can be done either by manually metering a matt green leaf lit in the same way as the yellow flower or by using exposure compensation (need to use a + value to increase the exposure to compensate for bright yellow). Depending on how much of the frame is filled with yellow and whether there are other tones in the shot, the exposure increase can be as much as a stop or more.

Take a shot, check the monitor and make any further adjustments necessary. I prefer not to use exposure compensation because I find it all too easy to forget to reset it back to 0. For an expanded version of how to accurately meter high key subjects see this post.

These images illustrate just a few examples of yellow in nature – not forgetting canaries, orchids and yellow coral polyps.

You might like other posts in this series:

Blue  Green  Red