Looking through rose tinted glasses

That’s the expression, right? And I do love colours – although you couldn’t tell it by the way I dress, ah the life of contradictions – and so, a couple of weeks ago I bought a purple lens to add a bit of colour to my usually grey and gloomy photos (well, that’s the English weather really). Yes, you can adjust many things on the #Nikon camera I’m using, but I’m just starting out, and I don’t have the patience to appear professional. I just want to take photos and have fun, just look at this purple beauty below! And yes I know, lavender is purple already …

Purple lens in action – neighbours’ lavender

So, once I discovered the joy of purple lens I decided to go one step further and yes, I did buy lots of different colours! Here are some of my signature style photos of a street lamp (it’s either that or a picture of a chimney, a roof or a telegraph pole) taken with a variety of colour lenses. There were minutes long gaps between taking the photos hence you can see the clouds have changed their position, they refused to co-operate, how rude!

Yellow lens
Orange lens
Blue lens
Red lens
Original; no colour lens
Green lens

I guess you could get similar/ same effects with any editing software, but I wanted the thrill of looking at the world through ‘rose tinted glasses’ … or lenses in this case. Each of the colours brings out different aspects of the object you photograph, creates a different mood, e.g. the shot of the sun through a red lens (below) gives it an apocalyptic feel to it. The purple rose thrives in the blue lens, just like the plant with the red flowering does when I used the green lens.

But not all of my experiments were successful, for example using the red lens for photographing the plant with the red flowering made it look almost white – you do learn some things about colours and lights that way – and any photos taken with the orange and red lenses lost a lot of details. My eye felt like it needed a moment to search for the contours of the flowers or plant, to figure it out.

Even with a couple of setbacks, I’m still very excited to be using the colour lenses. I just need more objects and settings to practise on. So, onwards and upwards, as they say!