Limited Colour Palette

The November assignment in my still-life photo project for 2025 focused on “Limited Colour Palette”, and it made me realise that I’ve already been using this theme repeatedly in my sessions. You could see this for example in the photos below, where the focus on combination of red and green or shades of yellow and orange highlighted the composition and the included parts.

Simplifying the colour range draws more attention to the story a photo conveys. This is certainly true of black and white photographs, but even when using a limited number of colours, the effect remains striking.

I’ve chosen two photos as my finalists from this assignment, which you can see below.

The first is comprised of a candle, a tube with dried flowers, and a jar full of small clothes pegs, combining white, red, and brown. I particularly like how not only the colours but also the cork, glass and flower motifs interconnect this trio of objects.

From a technical perspective, editing such a photo is a nightmare because you need to eliminate all unwanted reflections and dust spots. Never forget thorough preparation — but even then…

This type of a photo is ideal for creating what I call “multiplied” images; you can see more of these in my gallery. All are created from a single photograph combined as triptychs or tetraptychs through different angles, zoom levels and editing touches. The result is always unique.

The second photo relates the story of a conversation between a free bird and a caged bird.

The birds are looking at one another through the bars of the cage, tweeting without issuing a sound in expressive, silent conversation. I’ve edited the photo in two additional versions — one somewhat foggy and the other tinted whilst still preserving the original limited colours.

Sometimes we can see the cages around others and even around ourselves, from our alternative, wiser or simply older perspective. That gave me pause for thought.