Gallery: emptying into white

I built my house from barley rice

Green pepper walls and water ice

Tables of paper wood, windows of light

And everything emptying into white

Into White, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)

There is something ethereal and fascinating about images that lack the colours that we normally relate to the spectrum. Do we even always think of white as a colour, or do we consider it a lack of colour?

It’s a long while since I participated in Debbie’s One Word Sunday challenge, but I do love a colour challenge and this one is a bit different as white can be hard to photograph, I feel. Subjects that are mostly white can fool the meter in your camera. If you aren’t careful you get underexposed shots, or you risk over-compensating and end up with burned-out highlights. But get it right and these white images can be easily as striking as more brightly coloured ones.

And fortunately, if you don’t get it right in camera there are editing tools that can correct wrong exposure to some extent. You can even add that ethereal white on white feel that will make your images stand out despite the lack of colour; indeed, because of that lack of colour.

Here’s a selection of some favourites to illustrate what I mean. I confess to some creative editing to emphasise the effect I wanted to create for this gallery. For example, many of the flowers were edited with Nik Color Efex Pro filters, including soft focus and vignettes.

My feature photo is of a polar bear on the sea ice north of Svalbard. To see captions for the photos below please click on them (this may not work if viewing on a phone)