Exercise: 'Colour relationships'

Red : green 1:1

Orange : blue 1:2

Yellow : violet 1:3

As it says in the course book, finding specific colour relationships out and about is not easy. I resisted the urge to set up my own arrangements until I began to struggle with finding a combination of yellow and purple. I was saved by spotting a fridge magnet and my Italian niece wearing a violet scarf. The red and green shot - my grandson playing out on holiday - just jumped out at me whilst trawling through my photo stash. It was a similar event with the orange and blue: I was gazing out of an easyJet plane window, whilst flying over Italy, back in October, when the view said:'Take my photo now - you need me...!' So here we are.

Colour relationships of my choosing...

This house is on the main road through a small town near where I live and is really painted in these colours! I simple had to stop and take some photographs. When doing so, I encountered a disgruntled neighbour, who remarked: 'Damned eyesore! That house causes accidents because drivers slow down to look at it and not the road ahead...!' Ah, the power of distinctive colour relationships...

This is dawn on a summer's morn, taken, I think in July. It's just before sun-up. You can see a planet - Jupiter or Venus - providing a nice 'point'. I love the interplay between the blue and yellow. The fact that the sun has not yet risen encourages us to focus on the colours without being distracted by the attention-hungry ball of fire...

This was my grandson's - but he's too much of a 'big boy' for this sort of thing now!  But I  loved the vibrancy between the green and the violet.

And here is the man himself - posing under his bright umbrella in a hot day last summer. He's so busy cultivating a cool image that he is completely unaware of the interesting colour relationships that are going on behind him...