Capture the Colour!

I read about the very cool Capture the Colour photoblogging contest a few weeks ago. I liked the concept a lot but was totally hoping to not be caught nominated – I was really intimidated by some of this year’s submissions. Basically, you show off your five favourite travel photos that best capture the colours white, yellow, red, blue, and green. After that, you tag five bloggers and challenge them to participate as well.

In the end, I was tagged by the lovely Kirsten from My Next Adventure and I’m really happy she did! It’s all in good fun anyway, right? Thanks to this, I’ve learned how big of a difference some photo-editing can make!

If you click through my links, or have me as a friend on Facebook, you might be able to see the originals… they’re not so special. Thank goodness for Aviary via Flickr because my netbook doesn’t have the processing power for Photoshop…

Here are my pic(k)s:

White

This is a photo of the Skywheel in Niagara Falls. I went there with my partner around this time last year so he could see the Falls. We didn’t actually go on the Skywheel, but I thought it would take a really cool picture! This was taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S2980 and I actually didn’t do much editing, just increased the contrast and sharpness slightly.

Yellow

This is a photo of a street performer in Dominica playing the tambour in October 2012. I chose this for yellow because the contrast between his black-painted face and the yellow wall make both very striking. I had to increase the sharpness and brightness quite a bit – I took this with my Fuji.

Green

This photo is a view from the Arc de Triomphe during my trip to Paris in 2009. You would have thought that after living in the Caribbean for 15 months this would have been the easiest colour for me – but it wasn’t! I wanted something where the green stood out, rather than it saturating the photo. This was taken with my Nikon Coolpix S210. Even though it was a grey day, I didn’t need much sharpening (my Nikon took much better pictures than my Fuji) but I put a filter on it to help the green stand out.

Blue

This photo is from my favourite hike in Martinique – Presqu’ile de la Caravelle. On a three hour hike, you walk around four different biospheres. My partner and I did this hike a couple weeks before I left the island this year and he decided to walk out to this cliff in the savanna biosphere. I’m way too afraid of heights too walk out onto something like that, so I took pictures instead. It kind of looks like Pride Rock from The Lion King (which I should point out he saw for the first time 6 months ago! I know – I was like…whaaaat?). Anyway, not much editing, some increase in sharpness (my Fuji wasn’t so great with that) and saturation, just to bring out that lovely blue.

Red

Red is my favourite colour! This is also one of my favourite photos I took in Martinique: the Tombolo and Ilet Sainte-Marie. Tombolos are a pretty rare phenomenon. I think the composition is pretty good, and though the subjects are the hillocks, the red canoe catches your eye. Also, one hillock is actually reflecting on the pool of water on the Tombolo – I couldn’t have Photoshopped it better. I mean, it could be Photoshopped to be cooler, but I couldn’t do it – ha!