Color and Light

 Ernst Haas

By: Amanda Schaeffer

Ernst Haas, Las Vegas 1975

            The color and light assignment has made me push my creativity and ideas on what I want to feature in this assignment. My friend and I might go walk the city of Williamsport and see what murals or architect we can find that has colors portrayed in it. Color is dominant in photography so it's no surprise that there's an assignment solely about it. For when the color and light assignment was presented in class, I picked Ernst Haas to talk about since many of his work includes deep tones of color and light.

            When analyzing Ernst Haas' work, you can tell that he likes to capture life of cities. I find this really interesting because sometimes cities aren't always the most colorful when looking at grey skyscrapers and black roads. However, Haas makes it work by finding different perspectives around the city to capture. For example, I went to his photography website, and I looked under the "American" category and found the picture above. Haas captured this in Las Vegas and seems to be under a movie theater or just downtown somewhere with funky led lights. I love the angle he captured this at, looking up and seeing how the lights form a line. The colors of the blue, red, and white are saturated and just make the image pop more. With the red and white swirls, your eyes like to follow it and lead you to the path of mixed color of lights. Also, the red and blue stripe lights going across the picture also really draws the viewers eyes in closer. The hue that those two colors have are insane. It almost feels like I'm at Las Vegas under the roof looking up at these crazy colorful lights. I have really nothing to critique since the image is captured well and how the colors pop out. He inspires me for my color assignment and I'll keep his unique perspectives of color in mind when shooting for my project.

            Ernst Haas's image is beautifully created with the tone of colors presented in the picture and with the perspective he took it at. The color and lighting in this photograph are unbelievable, and makes it feel like the viewer is in Las Vegas and experiencing the light show. The viewer can tell that the main focus in the image was color and Ernst Haas always captures that in all his photographs, especially this one.