Exercise #1 - Pick a color

Horses in the field behind my house

Exercise #1 in Five Self Assignments was Pick a color. I picked green. When I lived on the Eastern Seaboard I hated the green. Everyone thought since I was from the desert (oh, so many people misunderstand New Mexico) I would love the green. But it was all the same color of green. And nothing seemed to break it up. I would escape to the beach at every opportunity to get away from that one constant shade of green.

So landscape photographer aside I do not feature a lot of green in my subjects. And I hardly use green in my paintings. And if I do it is a sage green. I loved this picture of the horses in my field because there are so many shades of green in that one picture. Nature has a lot of shades of green.

Angel Wing Begonia

I took all these green photographs in about 20 minutes. And by walking no more than 20 feet (includes the horses). Having a greenhouse and a garden helped this exercise. But if you look back at my last few posts you will note green is not the main color in any of my photos on the whole.

Agave Colorata Mescal Ceniza

Not only is green so many different shades but sunlight changes the green like on the leaves on the euphorbia below.

Explosion of leaves on a Euphorbia

And the buds on a hollyhock are barely green.

Hollyhock buds and lemon grass

And even green plants are not all green. I love the red stalks and blue flowers on borage.

Borage

I include the photograph below in my exercise on green because that is the way green usually shows up in my photographs - something out of focus in the background of the main subject.

Bee coming in for a landing

The green is a Lemon balm plant, the white an onion flower (note green stalks) and the bee just intruded.