I have written about getting together with friends and like-minded photography souls either in a group or in a photo workshop, to pick up some inspiration and get feedback on your work. It’s also a great way to jump-start your creative juices.

In our area, there is a group of us, a sub group of our professional association, that gets together every three or four months to share the results of a photographic project we’ve chosen at the previous gathering. We had brainstormed, and I came up with the idea of having a color as the topic. We chose yellow, and over the next few months, I found myself looking not only for yellow subjects, but different ways of using the yellow.

We met at the studio of one of our group. Everyone brought something, and as we sipped and munched away, there was a lot of kidding, as one person admitted to not doing the assignment, thinking he couldn’t make it to the gathering. “Oh, &#@*,” he said that morning, “I can now go and I don’t have anything.” He found a lone yellow flower that he “planted” in a large green field. One very small, yellow flower in one very large, green field.

Another of the group didn’t have anything either, but he thought of sunflowers and remembered a field near his house that had some. He drove up and down the road, and couldn’t find them. He was sure it was on that road, and he drove by again. Finally, something caught his eye. The missing sunflowers were, indeed, there, just residing on the other side of the road!

Our host decided to treat yellow another way. Instead of recording yellow, he picked three undeniably yellow objects: a lemon, a banana, and a summer squash and processed them in black and white with just a mere hint of yellow. A woman in the group had some yellow flowers that she shot in a dreamy style and put into a triptych. Another of our group did a shot of a little boy looking cross-eyed at a (dead) yellow butterfly on his nose.

Someone did a strong, graphic shot of the yellow lines on a road with some white paint dribbled here and there, as well as the bottom left portion of a yellow road sign with a yellow sports car that fortuitously streaked by in the distance.

I did a number of shots, all but one of them created during our spring and summer workshops.

The first workshop in the mountains of western Virginia gave us lots of subject matter with spring greens, gentle misty backgrounds, and of course, gorgeous cascades, but they aren’t yellow, so I couldn’t use them for this exercise! I did find an old tree one late afternoon in the misty distance with a yellow cast to it. Yellow flowers were more obvious, so I stayed away from them, working instead with students to help them see flowers in a different way.

Maine produced quite a bit of yellow. In our final scouting before the workshop, I found some lichen making a wonderful pattern across a dark rock. There were, of course, the yellow lobster pots, so the trick there was to present them in a way I had not seen before.

As I was reviewing some of my favorite vantage points at a lighthouse I know well, I was struck by a tidal pool nestled amongst the rocks, the slight ripples in the water highlighting the yellow.

There was the forsythia against a white fence, but I didn’t manage to isolate it to my satisfaction. I did, however, find another lobster pot, an old one with the paint peeling off. While it was not yellow per se, it was the yellow in it that set off the orange. If it had just been the orange against the Styrofoam, I don’t think it would have been nearly as interesting.

Back home, our gardens were in their spring prime. One of the lilies beckoned to me, and I isolated it against the background.

We returned to Maine for a private workshop with a family. Among other things, we had been showing them how to protect their equipment, many of the suggestions, photo hints that have appeared in this blog over the past months. I was working with the wife/mother when it started to rain. Her bag was at the other end of the pier, so I pulled one of those micro-fibre cloths out of my bag and laid it across the top of her camera. It didn’t impede her view, and it worked perfectly! As I was watching her compose her photograph, I realized I had another yellow shot.

In France, there seemed to be green, green, green … lush green vineyards! There were also the incredible roses, but they were various shades of pink and red. It’s not that there weren’t many other colors, too, but yellow was not part of the palette. Think of Monet. How much yellow do you see in many of his paintings?

We were driving along a back road before the start of our workshop, and stopped to photograph the workers in the field. No, no yellow there, just white lorries and people dressed in denim, white, and the occasional red. Then, a little camion pulled up and parked right by me. Beyond it were the vineyards, giving it a sense of place. Very French!

Towards the end of the workshop, we took our group to a lovely cheateau, previously described in an earlier blog. While we loved photographing the water lilies, I found a lone yellow lily pad nestled against two green friends.

As those of you know who follow this blog, we headed to Paris for a few days before heading home. At the market in Montparnasse, there were lots of bananas, but they defied being arranged as people picked among them to take home the best specimens. There were the gorgeous arrays of flowers, mostly pinks and lavenders and reds, until I found a display of Begonias and decided to use the yellow to lead the eye into the quintessential French “price tag.”

There was the yellow table cloth on the river boat (too far and not an interesting shot for the color yellow), the yellow striped musician’s shirt (too boring), the dog’s yellow collar (off and running), etc.

On our night shot from Pont des Arts, however, I was attracted to the warm, yellow light of the bridges. You may have seen the shot last week, and now you know partly why I made it!

It was a fun exercise. It’s one that in one form or another we have given some of our students over the years. For me, that’s one of the joys of teaching…helping students find their own creativity and different way of seeing.

Upcoming workshops: Arches & Moab (UT); New England Fall Foliage (NH & VT); and Lighthouses of the Outer Banks (NC). For more information, go to our Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures website.

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