Capturing True Colour in Photos

Shortly after starting my blog in 2016, while taking pictures of some spring flowers, I noticed how hard it was to get some colours to show up in photos the way I see them in real life. Blue flowers are particularly hard to capture. Since then I've noticed that sunrises (but not sunsets) seem to photograph differently from what my eye sees, as well. The moon is difficult, too - without fail, a beautiful amber moon looks pale yellow in photos.

Now, some of this is undoubtedly my camera. It is a point and shoot digital camera and it is older than my blog. But when I was having trouble photographing the blue spring flowers, I remember searching the internet for an explanation. The best answer I could find was that there is no true blue in nature: our perception of it is determined by the physics of light.

Maybe that applies to other colours too. Recently I bought my mother a cardigan; it was a beautiful shade of deep pink that I hoped she would like, as she has definite preferences about the colour of her clothing. It was a thrift store buy, and had non-matching buttons which I wanted to replace. I thought the before and after photos of the sweater with its change of buttons might be interesting to compare and I might write about it. I've been having trouble finding a topic to blog about recently because I mostly just consume political news . . . but that's a post for another day, or not at all.

I did not use my digital camera to take these pictures (the battery needed charging), so the problem is not entirely the camera either. I used my tablet, which doesn't seem to take great photos overall, but colours are generally okay. But when I went to photograph the sweater, I realized the colour was off, and that became the focus of my photos.

Here is the before photo, with original buttons:

And here's the after photo with pale pink buttons:

But look how much the colour of the sweater has changed! I took both photos in the same location in front of a northerly window, so the only thing that was different was the time of day and hence the lighting. The second photo was taken about two hours after the first. (It didn't take me two hours to sew on five buttons, I just got distracted doing something else in the middle of the job.)

But the weirdest thing is that neither of these photos caught the true colour of the sweater. I went from place to place in my house trying to find a spot that would give me the photo I wanted. I tried different lighting and different angles. I didn't go outside in natural light because it was a miserably wet and cold day and I'm not that dedicated.

Finally, I was able to reproduce the colour as my eyes were seeing it. It's the colour in the shadowed region (left side) of the following shot:

The shadow was created by the tablet as I held it to take the photo.

I don't know why it was so hard to photograph this colour in a true-to-life way. Maybe one of you who has a better camera or more knowledge of colour theory or photography can help me with this question.

My mother liked the sweater very much, by the way, so I was relieved and happy that I was able to provide her a bit of enjoyment at a time when she doesn't seem to have much of that.

Have you noticed similar issues with your photos?

Have you ever replaced the buttons on clothing to make it look nicer?

Have you ever gotten distracted in the middle of one thing by something infinitely more interesting?

Have you been following politics recently?

Have a good weekend, my people. May you never EVER have a blog post with as many suggestions by auto-correct as I've had with this one - every time I've spelled "colour" it has been underlined with that annoying red squiggly line that demands I change it to "color" 😁