Camera: Leica M9
Exposure: 1/3000
Aperture: f/1.7
Focal Length: 35mm
ISO: 160
As we pass into late summer, flowers like this are starting to fade some. However, these are growing in a neighbors front yard on my way to work and I love the colors in it. Intense yellow and green are the colors of high summer. Yellow is the color of our sun and green is the color of life that represents safety and passage, lying in-between blue and yellow on the spectrum from 495-570nm.
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If we reduce the above image to 256 colors, this color palette is what is represented. Does the purple surprise you? It certainly did me, but its there. You can pull every color seen in this 256 color palette out of the histogram from the image at top.
Going a little further in our experiment in color, saturating scenes like this, while beautiful can be confusing for those with color blindness. For instance, these two images show us the very same image at the top along with the very same color mosaic right below it as seen through the eyes of someone with a form of color blindness called protanopia.
For more on colorblindness, see this post which, along with this post is yet another example of how the senses work to synthesize our moment to moment realities. A protanope standing on the sidewalk looking at these flowers, sharing the moment with someone who sees in 3 colors is having a very different experience synthesized into their brain which is really cool if you think about it. Both of those people would agree on many things, except what color they are seeing because their sensory inputs are different. Now, extrapolate that out to any one of the other sensory modalities and you can start to appreciate how different people are wired and how they might respond given a set environment.