Good Colour Bad Colour Ugly Colour

The days of putting our films in to the chemist and hoping for some decent prints in a fortnight are long past. We now put our memory cards into the card reader and hope for some decent images in 5 seconds. The time occupied by gnawing anticipation is reduced greatly but we have also lost the consolation of being able to buy a bag of barley sugar sweets even if everything is blurry.

Same with colour. We once got what we were given and liked it. Sometimes we got what we deserved. The cost of colour slide film or colour printing in the film era was considerable - and we did not waste our shots. But what came back was tied to the temperature and purity of the baths in the processor and that could be a mixed bag - and sometimes the technicians loading the machines got it horribly wrong. Ask me about the wedding that vanished...

Nowadays we can get our colour RAW and cook it for ourselves. We can take precautions to prevent all but the direst disaster. Most of our weddings and some of our brides survive. Of course we may be wrong with the colour - that is still a subjective matter for most shoots. We are aided by the mechanisms in modern cameras and can make use of Datacolor colour charts of various types. We can calibrate our monitors and printers and viewing lights and everything. We can desaturate everything and talk up the art of it...fancy footwork can save a bad situation. Try to show the prints in a dark restaurant after a few drinks...

In the end, we need to remember that we are not making real objects - we are making flat images of real objects. We can get 66% of the way to realism but that third dimension kills it. If we are not making a stab at realistic representation we can even throw the 66% away - as long as we can please the viewer.

 Remember that sometimes we can't  - Vincent van Gogh made a dynamite starry, starry night but nobody wanted to buy it then.