thankful thursday - colors

After taking a six-month hiatus, I decided to do another photo 365 project this year. The idea is to take a photo every day to document your everyday life, to become a better a photographer and to learn to use the full potential of your camera (doesn't matter if it's a smartphone or an expensive dSLR or something in-between).

Capture Your 365 (CY365) is the website I use and they send me a prompt via email every day. This week has been "Color Week" with prompts like "monochrome" and "draw" and "mostly white." As I have thought about what I want to photograph to capture the prompt AND my everyday life, I realized "color" was in my thoughts a lot. And then I began to ponder how we see colors and if all animals do.

You may remember from high school biology that the retina of the eye contains two types of photoreceptor cells: cone photoreceptors (called cones) that respond to different wavelengths of lights allowing us to see colors and rod photoreceptors (called rods) that are sensitive to light and dark changes, shape and movement. Cones require bright light to work while rods work in low light situations.

Some animals, such as humans and closely related primates, have three different cone types allowing them to see all the colors. Other animals, such as dogs, cats, ferrets, hyenas, "color-blind" humans and many more, have two different cone types which allows them to see some colors. Interestingly, this may actually improve an animal's ability to distinguish colors in dim light, an advantage for nocturnal animals. And still other animals, like all marine mammals and the owl monkey, have just one cone type and see in shades of black and white.

Some of the early prompts this week were variations of black and white or monochromatic which I did as white/gray. While it was fun to experiment with these photos either in finding naturally colored subjects or with editing, I quickly realized that seeing EVERYTHING in shades of gray would be very monotonous and boring.

Other prompts lent themselves to aspects of color. It was fun to experiment with subjects that made the colors pop or fade away or shoot in bright sunlight or in shade. 

As I looked back through the photos I took this week, I became increasingly grateful for the gift of color. While there is definitely beauty in black and white, I think I much prefer to view the world through my rose (and pine green and periwinkle and butter yellow and ...) colored glasses.