Today I want to share one of the photo I made almost month ago with Sylwia. This was agency tests day and we went together (like 3 photographers) with agency models (like uhm... 5-6 girls and 2 boys?) to a local park in our city. I'm not a fan of a shooting next to a green trees, but I follow idea of others to join. I actually made few shoots there which I'm happy about (including this one), but working with colours there is a nightmare. And exactly colours are the reason why I don't like to shoot close to trees/grass as green cast is all over the place - especially face which is damn hard to get proper colour.
This process in a photography is often called colour contamination. It happens when you have object of given colour reflecting itself onto other object. It might be obvious in some situation (like putting shining balls of different colour next to each other and observe them), but to me it was not that obvious when it comes to portrait photography. It's also a reason why usually studio places doesn't have any colour inside - they are usually white. It's also the reason why you should not wear a colour shirt as a photographer or assistant on the stage. All of those colourful object just contaminate objects surrounding them. Some of them might be easy to fix, some of them not.
That's the case with green colour - it's exactly opposite of red tones that is quite often included in human skin and added together they end up somewhere... grayish/greenish. This is hard to control and fixing it requires some manual work in Photoshop. Pretty frustrating, especially if you would like to get more photos done quickly.
Last thing to mention - there is of course tricks to fight this problem on stage. One is to try block it with reflector - yes it can be used not only to add light (or fill shadows), but also to block colour contamination. Just try to imagine how and where most of the contamination coming from and try to stop it having reflector in middle. Another way of fixing it is to override it with stronger light source like a flash. This works fine outdoors if you light subject straight. Keep in mind that strobe light also can reflect from other sources, so better not try bounce it from grass. Same thing applies in studio condition. Sometimes you can go opposite - if you want to have red cast - you don't need red gel for your strobe - simply bounce flash trough something red - shirt, wall... fire extinguisher? Whatever should work!
Just in case you're interested further - just search for Colour Contamination subject around the web, there is already plenty of great knowledge out there. Just let me know if something is too complex or wrong I will try to fix it/explain further. Have great day and thank you for reading!
