Magenta

What is it they say about the best laid plans?

Anyway. Magenta. Other than this being Steph's favorite color...what else does Magenta have going for it? Well my friends, Magenta is actually a pretty important color! Remember our old friends the Primary colors?

Good ol' RED, YELLOW, and BLUE.

*hee hee...did you read those by the color on screen or by the text? :) err...sorry. Back to Magenta.

Do you remember what used to happen when you would combine those good ol' primary colors?

Red + Yellow = Orange
Blue + Red = Purple
Yellow + Blue = Green

And so on and so forth. But being the amateur color mixers that we were, we couldn't mix much more than that. Remember how everything would just turn into a brownish blob of color?

Did you know that this is why printers use the colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black? (better known as CMYK *bonus points if you know what the 'K' stands for*) These four colors combine to make a FAR larger range of colors than the old Red, Yellow, and Blue when it comes to pigment mixing. Since I only use the free version of Photoshop, I don't have the option of printing in CMYK. But the average person probably isn't going to be able to tell the difference. If I ever start printing out my photographs...that will be a different story.

Recently, at the North Texas Irish Festival, I discovered that stage lighting can make use of similar colors. Meet Angus. He's here to help us illustrate this point.



Angus is the frontman for a great little indie band called Brother. I caught them for the first time two years ago and was glad to see them back (albeit one member shorter) this year. They play a variety of instruments which really gives their music a unique sound.



These pictures were an experiment as I'm not a concert photographer and don't really have the proper lenses for this type of lightning situation. When I took them I thought "What the heck. It's not like I'm wasting film or anything." Surprisingly, I actually came out with some decent shots.

But I digress. The shots you get to see today are the shots that are illustrating the use of Magenta in stage lighting. (i.e. not necessarily the best shots I took) In looking at the following picture I (being a huge nerd) went "Hey! That's CMY! Cool!". Take a look:



See it? For those of you that are less nerdy than me and wouldn't notice the color separation from the lights on the shirt of the lead singer while listening to a rockin' awesome band...here it is a little clearer:


(click on that pic to get a closer and more readable version of the photo)

Here it is one more time...but with a different focus. Say hello to Drew. He plays the didgeridoo real awesomeish!



So there you go. Magenta DOES have a purpose! And maybe I'll post more of the concert pics sometime soon...