The image above as originally photographed; desaturated version below.

The George Eastman House in Rochester, NY is mounting an exhibition that commemorates the 100^th anniversary this year of Technicolor film.  That got me thinking about the use of color in photography – in particular, the issue of “true” color.  (Technicolor itself is highly saturated, giving the world a luster that can be found nowhere else but in a Hollywood film.)  The human eye does not perceive color the way it appears on screen or in a photograph.  Different films and digital cameras operate within their own color ranges.  The eye tends to adjust for color shifts caused by changes in lighting, so that a white object always appears white.  However, a camera will pick up shifts in color balance caused by changes in natural or artificial light.  For example, an outdoor scene may have a golden hue at sunrise or sunset that disappears at midday.  Similarly, a white wall might appear yellow in incandescent light and blue in florescent light.  So what, then, is the true color?

Many masters of the black-and-white medium like Ansel Adams found color to be a distraction, although Adams did experiment with it.  My digital photograph at top illustrates the problem.  The green hallway at right, bright red-handled implement in the bowl at left, and yellow-and-orange object below all pull the eye in different directions away from the center of the photograph.  I might have solved the problem altogether by eliminating color and working in black and white.  Alternately, I could have reduced the color vibrancy of the image’s distracting elements, which retaining the rich saturation of the wooden shelves and walls.  Instead, I chose to desaturate the color of the entire image to give it old-time look in keeping with many of the objects on display here.