The color we see in the world around us is highly subjective, so much so that it is very likely the single most subjective element in all of photography. In fact, I would argue that color is the hardest element for a photographer to master, at least in terms of using it as a tool to convey emotion to the viewer. As for myself, I enjoy the challenge, seeing a subject and instantly getting that feeling in the back of my mind that its colors are of visual interest and should therefore be photographed.
A common misconception is that colors have to be saturated and vibrant to be of any photographic interest, that is very far from true! In fact, I actually prefer the subtle tones one finds late in the afternoon when the sun is low in the sky and the atmosphere is thick with moisture; just think of the Indian ocean with its perennial haze and the beautiful color palette that results therefrom. The tricky bit with subtle tones isn’t finding them, it’s capturing them. The subtler the tones are and the smoother the gradation between different tones is, the harder it is for photographic equipment to capture their nuances and hence convey the desired visual effect to the viewer. Our eyes and visual cortex are simply awesome biological machines, the photographic equipment we use today —despite being light-years ahead of anything previous generations used— is still vastly inferior in many regards.
Let me digress slightly and speak briefly about color film. I do shoot color film, not often but enough to know that despite its limitations, color film still holds a special place in my arsenal of photographic equipment. If I said that current digital technology lags far behind what our eyes and visual cortex are capable of, then I would have to place color film way back in another universe altogether. In fact, color film is about as far as you could get from the holy grail of perfect color reproduction. These mid-twentieth century film emulsions, the majority of which were created deep inside chemical laboratories in Tokyo (Fujifilm) and Rochester New York (Eastman Kodak), can best be described as artistic interpretations of whatever really stood in front of the camera. Therefore, I would argue that they are best used as such, artistic tools to add flair to our photographs and not as competition to our current digital medium.
Now let’s get to the crux of the matter: at the time of writing, there are no commercially available cameras capable of capturing true high-fidelity color information. Instead, we seem to be stuck with a variety of brands —each with their own algorithm to interpolate the myriad of Red Green and Blue (RGB) signals modern sensors record— desperately trying to outdo one another in a meaningless battle of approximates. There is a system (Sigma Foveon) that claims to achieve high-fidelity color and to their credit they do come close, however they invariably fall short in at least one color channel, thereby bringing us back to where we started. It has to be said though that there are multishot systems currently available that can register precise color information, the problem with these is that they are very limiting in terms of the subject matter one can shoot due to the very nature of the process involved. I know this because I have shot extensively with a variety of such systems in an attempt to find the perfect tool to overcome what I humorously call, “the color conundrum”.
These days though, I primarily shoot with flawed equipment —at least in terms of color output— and rely heavily on post processing and painstaking color editing to get a visual result that I can be satisfied with. This is very tedious work, that much I can assure you, yet the results should speak for themselves…