Contrast is a compositional resource like few others. It helps you to enhance both your color images and your black and white images.
It is an essential component that will help you explain a story, to highlight your protagonist, to guide the gaze and convey a sensation. It is, in short, an element of a very complete visual richness in photography.
When we think of contrast, we often think of those images with very pure blacks and whites and true, it is. But there are also many other ways to contrast your image.
Let’s see them quickly:
Contrast Types
These are some of the most used types.
- Shape: when we have shapes that are very different from each other, or when we have a rhythmic pattern and we break it with a completely different element (such as a round shape in the middle of some vertical lines), we are working on the contrast by shape.
- Brightness: the difference between light and shadow It is one of the best known and most used types of contrast. The light magically helps to create a unique atmosphere and ambience in the image.
- Colour: Complementary colors are those that are located opposite each other on the color wheel and are the ones that contrast the most.
- Scale: the size of the elements of the photograph can also provide you with a good option to create contrast between large and small.
- Meaning: old age and childhood, the rich and the poor, joy and sadness… all those opposite meanings in an image they create a contrast of meaning.
- Texture: we can also use textures to contrast the image. One rough and one smooth, such as a twisted log in the middle of fine sand on a beach, can help you focus interest where texture stands out the most.
Here you have a very complete article on photographic contrast that I recommend you read to finish seeing all the possibilities of photographic contrast.
Gallery
Having said that, I have selected some contrast images so you can see what playing with this resource in images can give.
You will see totally different photographs that have used some kind of contrast in their compositions. Some with color contrast such as pink and green or yellow and blue, others by scale, others by the difference between light and shadow, others by shape, and you will even see some that it is possible to achieve contrast with movement.
I hope you enjoy them, but above all that they inspire you with some great photography. Click to enlarge and enjoy the experience in a big way 😉 .
I hope you are overflowing with inspiration when you finish reading this article, because that is what it is all about 😉 . As I hope I have shown you through the images, photographic contrast goes a long way and serves as a very useful tool for any type of photographer and photography.
Both for those of you who see the world in color, and those who perceive it in black and white, for those who hallucinate with lines, and for those who see textures everywhere. For advertising, night or portrait photography. It goes for everything.
So try to always keep it in mind when composing your images 🙂 .
I hope you have found this article-gallery useful and inspiring. If so, try to inspire more people by sharing it on one of your favorite social networks (or all 😉 ).
Thank you very much for always being here. we read each other