RustyBug Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Well, whenever I see warmly toned sidelighting I tend to think the image was shot in either early morning or late in the day.
It is based on the "memory" of having seeing that color of light at those times of day. Going into the mountains and being on the opposite side from the sun blocks those warm tones and instead, the lighting is cool from the overhead sky (but that wouldn't be side lighting). I didn't live around the mountains, so the notion of cool morning light was a bit foreign to me until I experienced/studied it a bit to understand why it would be that way.
In that manner, an expectation of what the color represents can be inconsistent from one region to another (east side vs. west side of the mountain)... but it still has a rational rooted in the human experience. The more we experience, the more we have to draw on (our memory) as to what the color ... MAY ... correlate to.
One thing I've come to notice is that I've never thrown a blue snowball or seen blue tree bark. When we are that close to the snow or tree, our eye/brain accommodates for color. However, when we look off in the distance, the color of the shadows can look blue. Walk on over grab some snow, and it'll not be blue. Thus, we learn to associate blue/cool with distance. The sky is distant, the ocean is distant and as the water reflects the distant sky with its blue color the association of blue/distant is reinforced in a natural realm.
From that natural experience, people (typically) learn to associate cool with distant. Does this hold true, hard & fast, 100% ... nope, but it can be useful and has been embraced for millenium by painters throughout the ages to understand / apply the tenets of natural color perception to assist in the conveyance of their message. Do we have to follow those tenets ... nope. But, can they be helpful, some would argue yes, others not so much. Personally, I think it is valuable to at least understand them to a degree that you can use them to your advantage at your discretion ... which takes us full circle to Bif's perspective @ make it how you want it, but for some, it can be helpful to know WHY you want to make it a certain way to help harmonize rather than contradict your intended mood/message.
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