Road trips and Spring are a good thing.

Spring and Road trips are good combos. The colors are their most intense. Capturing the intensity isn't always that easy. This years trip took me up from LA to San Luis Obispo, San Simeon and back all along the coast.

Knowing a little about contrasting colors is a big start. Growing up my generation got that in elementary school art classes. The contrasts vary with the time of day and whether you have clouds in the sky or not.

Learning about the color of light during the day we picked up along the line. I still remember a basic Color Photo class in college where we took a series of pictures from one spot one hour apart from dusk to dawn to watch the progression. Slide film worked best as you couldn't balance out the shifts during the day. The day starts with the red end of the spectrum getting the emphasis moving to Blues at mid-day then back to the red end at dusk.

This photo the brilliant orange flowers I spotted blooming at the Santa Barbara Zoo. Orange's direct contrast is Blue. A lesser contrast is Green. To make those flowers really pop I altered the framing to get more of the blue sky in. Add in the mid afternoon sun with only a light haze and you have two shades of orange contrasting with each other. Color Contrast, Sharp Shadow Contrast and you have an image that grabs the eye and shakes your sensors a bit. Not relaxing but vibrant.

Time for me to get busy and sort and process the 12 gigs worth of pics (all shot RAW so the files do take up a lot of space).