This week it’s Sofia’s turn to challenge us. What I thought was going to be an easy challenge turned out to be harder than I thought as I scanned my gallery for examples. She writes in her challenge, “This week I invite you to play with primary colours. You can pick one colour or show us examples of all 3, separately or together. What kind of feelings or moods do any of them instill in your photography, do you actively look for them or enjoy being surprised by the possibilities they present?” You can read her entire challenge post and check out her examples here.

My opening example features red and blue, missing yellow. The image below features all three (if you can accept the yellow in the fire used to heat the air in the balloon.)

Sofia points out rightly that the three primary colors we learned in primary school were called red, blue, and yellow, however technically, for the kind of crayon drawing we did as children, we would learn later that they really are magenta, cyan, and yellow. What, my elementary school teacher lied to me? Next thing you know, I will learn about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus… but I digress.

I learned the truth about printing colors in print shop class in high school. The teacher called them subtractive colors. Create four separations of your image separating the cyan, magenta, and yellow colors and when you join them together, you get a muddy color image. Add a black reference image and you can print full color in a newspaper or magazine. Adobe Photoshop has a way to allow you to create the CYMK separations for printing. There are YouTube videos that show you how.

One of my favorite things to do in black-and-white is to feature a color subject on a black-and-white background. This Farmall tractor is a great fit for this week’s challenge.

On our visit to Washington’s Olympic National Park in 2020, I happened to spot a bright red logging truck on its way to the mill.

In our backyard in Arizona, we had a beautiful yellowbell shrub. One especially prolific year, we got a tree that was absolutely full of blossoms. There’s that green, again.

Yellow cars are relatively uncommon. The Internet tells me that yellow doesn’t even make the top ten list of popular colors. With number 10 (orange) a mere 0.4%, that leaves yellow way down at the bottom of the list. Still, if I had the funds, it would be fun to drive around in this yellow beauty.

The Barrett-Jackson Auto Auctions feature automobiles like that yellow Ferarri, but they also accept vehicles of all types. A commission is a commission, I guess. While it looks pretty, I’m not sure I’d find myself underwater in it any time soon.

Sandwiched between all that blue sky and water, there is a strip of green and a reddish-brown shipwreck.

Some more water and sky with so much blue in the image, it cast a blue tinge on the gray rock.

Yes, I do have images featuring blue that isn’t water, though it’s hard not to find blue sky around a flight demonstration team unless they are on the ground.

Earlier I mentioned something about green. Well, I learned in Electronics Class that the three primary colors are red, blue, and green. Color televisions developed in the mid-20th century had special color picture tubes consisting of triads of red, blue, and green phosphors that glowed when struck by electrons. OK, that’s as technical as I will go about early color televisions.

What I was to learn is that if you mix subtractive primaries, cyan, magenta, and yellow, you will get black, but when you mix additive primaries, red, green, and blue, you will get white. Bombarding all three primary phosphors in a triad gives you a white pixel on those old television sets. So, in honor of the additive primaries, I give you some green primary colors. The Maxie’s sign features all three of the additive primary colors.

Since I featured a McCormick tractor, in deference to John Deere’s dominance in the farm tractor market, I feel that I must include the bright green model 1010 which was manufactured from 1960 to 1965 in Dubuque, Iowa.

In my discussion of car colors above, I referenced yellow as not making the list of popular colors. Green is eighth on the list with a market share of 0.7 percent. For comparison, red is fifth on the list with 10.3 percent and blue is sixth with 0.9 percent. We are apparently a colorless society when it comes to car colors, the top three colors, white, black, and gray, command 62.6 percent of the market.

For my final green image, I felt obligated to feature a panoramic image of Diablo Lake, a manmade lake on the Skagit River. The water in Diablo Lake is a beautiful turquoise color due to suspended fine rock particles in the water, which refract sunlight.

Thanks to Sofia for reminding me of my early training in color theory. To my surprise, I didn’t have as many primary color images in my gallery as I thought I might. Next week, the first week in September, Anne will host featuring a favorite genre of mine, black-and-white and monochrome images. This week Lynn and I are with family on our month-long fall road trip. Maybe I’ll have some brand-new monochrome images to share with you.

John Steiner