Color Capture: Great Salt Bay | 2025

The Great Salt Bay is located in Darmiscotta Maine

The Salt Marsh and the walk around it has a stunning palette, as does Maine in general. For me Maine will always be the color of the cedar needles carpeting the ground, an orange red that's deep but vibrant. Maine also keeps the darker colors that I, being from NJ/NY, associate with fall all year round, with evergreens and autumn reds. But they're intermingled with the palest of blue-greens in moss, a sharp chartreuse and the clearest of blues. Its an incredible range, and widely textured.

Experiment:

Capture 100 colors walking along the Great Salt Bay near Darmiscotta, Maine.

I'm trying a new approach in selecting colors, placing them on a grid as I work through the photos. One question is whether this will overly influence my selection of colors, with my "concept" of the colors in Maine overriding what's actually there.

By Time/As a Palette

By Hue

By Value

Plus:

Observing what colors are actually there, not what my preconceptions are

Minus:

My "new approach" was a disaster so I canceled it after 10 colors. Observing them in a single photo made me too aware of what colors there were, how they connected, and which I was choosing. Dissecting one photo section by section and not as a whole disrupted the discovery, making it too analytical.

So much of the color in this walk is textured and variated, the combinations so beautiful. Each photo could be a study of 100 colors, so that's what I tried to do (100 colors from a single photo)
Digital does not due justice to the color I think of as "cedar". Partially it's picking out "one" color when in reality it's made up of multiple colors resonating with each other. Also, because it's an "earthy" pigment, that emitted light can't quite capture.
Muted earth tones and piercing blues
True charcoal blacks
What is the most interesting vs the most obvious color?

Think about whether there is a way to use a single photo, or is this just antithetical to my idea of capturing what I experience, and time being part of the exploration

Color Captures

Overview