Sometimes, Being Beige Is Exactly What You Need

If you’re looking for impact, bright colours normally work better than magnolia, mushroom and beige, as these two shots of Delta show.

My good friend Fred used to describe some pictures as ‘beige’ – by which he meant that they were safe and unadventurous, like painting every wall in your house magnolia. When you are trying to produce something new and exciting, beige is very definitely bad: but there are occasions when being beige is precisely where you need to be.

More than 40 years ago, my job took me to a computer centre to look at a payroll system: the chap in charge of the place couldn’t find words bad enough to describe ICL computers, which had not been a success for his organisation. So they replaced everything and moved to Big Blue, IBM. So far, so reasonable: although there were others moving in the reverse direction.

Some things are quite complicated enough without being adventurous – for most of us, that includes computers. Beware of relying on anything in its ‘Beta’ phase, and leave it to the people who actually enjoy spending hours troubleshooting!

The problem was that the boss’s enthusiasm went beyond moving to what he saw as the more reliable option: he was what is now called a fanboy, and he wanted to be the most IBM computer centre possible and had thus taken on Beta testing status. That meant that his people got hold of all the latest gear and software before it was generally available, and tried it out. On the one hand, every new development arrived on his site first. On the other, every teething problem was coming straight to the site (and the staff) as well. In decorating terms, he was painting one wall scarlet, and the one next to it purple. I felt this was brave…

My wife likes what might be called brave colour choices around the house: yellow walls and red carpet make for a warm and cosy environment, but tend to lead to colour casts in photographs – not always as flattering as in this shot of Natalia Forrest.

Around the same time, Ford replaced the Cortina with the Sierra. The Cortina had been a best-seller for well over a decade, and was a competent all-rounder: it excelled at nothing, was in no way special, and people loved the reliability of a middle-of-the-road product. There were other cars that outperformed it in every area, but the secret of the Cortina’s success was that it was unchallenging and easy to live with. The Sierra was far more aerodynamic, a very sensible update, but it lost ground because it looked far less fashionable. It was, in fact, far less beige as a vehicle: ironically, many Sierras were in beige and similarly unexciting colours.

The question, then, is when to go scarlet, and when to stay beige. I’m going to suggest that this depends on your own style, and – especially – what you are doing with your camera on any given day.

Reliable choice camera – and from the sublime and the ridiculous… Although the Olympus 35RC is reasonably versatile, and the lens is good, it’s not neatly balanced with a professional flashgun.  

If you are off out to shoot pictures of the local swimming club prize giving, take your beige kit: an outfit that is boringly reliable, with no quirks. You won’t want the ultimate quality but you will want versatility: it’s the sort of gig for which a reliable old EOS 5D II with a 24-105 was made. You’re not setting records, you just want the battery to last all evening, and a little scope for adjusting the framing. (The only time I ever did this was way back in the days of film, and my friend was a Metz shoulder-pack flash that slogged through around 200 frames without blinking. Anything on the top of a camera would have died a third of the way through the night…)

And take some backup: the first wedding that I photographed, for a friend in 1975, was nearly a disaster, as I had only one SLR at the time, and it died the night before the wedding. I ended up shooting the pictures with a friend’s Olympus 35RC. It looked really silly strapped to my Metz 402 flashgun.

Not my picture, but a record/publicity shot taken by Coventry City Council’s photographer back in around 1990, and given to me when there was an office clear-lout. Shot on a 6×7 Mamiya and showing an office full of auditors hard at work. Uncharacteristically, I’m right at the back of the shot… When a photographer is needing to shoot large numbers of pictures under sometimes-challenging conditions, ultimate performance is less important than durability, and reliability matters more than cutting-edge technology or convenience.

What you do not want to be doing is taking a brand-new camera with a 50mm f/1.2 to shoot by available light: you may have issues with focus, battery life, the touch screen: with all manner of things that you didn’t read up in the manual. It will be different at the 45th event you approach with the camera and lens: an element of ‘good beige’ is familiarity with your equipment.

The arrow marks the danger spot… It’s a lovely feature for those who have mostly used a mobile ‘phone to take pictures: you touch the screen where you want to focus, and the camera focuses on that area and takes the picture. But if you are using the viewfinder (always better for holding a camera steady, with a two-handed grip, and the top held against your face) there’s a risk that your nose will select the focus area, or that other unwanted changes may happen. Unless you actually need one or more of the touchscreen features, it’s best to switch off.

A piece of advice on touch screens and camera settings. Learn how to live without the screen. Every important adjustment (shutter speed, ISO, aperture, exposure compensation) can be made on the majority of cameras – and all professional and semi-professional models – with the press of a button and a twist of a dial. That means that you can adjust the settings without taking the camera from your eye, providing that you know your camera thoroughly. If you are taking money from people for your pictures, I’d suggest that you should know your camera this well. Would you trust a taxi driver who had to look at the gear lever every time he changed gear?

One shot, two views… On the left, is the purist version, with thoroughly corrected verticals and natural colour. On the right is the Olympus Key Line in-camera effect, which makes a rather boring building more interesting, and retains converging verticals.

Good beige, bad beige. You may, of course, find that exactly the same solid and unadventurous gear is ideal for the most challenging and creative pictures, if you are going to be in physically-demanding environments, it’s precisely what you need, and the task is to put the camera in the right place to take a picture at the right time, and do your stuff with it. Your escape from Beige World is in the way that you use the kit, the risks you take with composition or technical settings, and the editing. But if the challenge is to go where others have never been, it may be different. And the same applies to processing. In both cases, your intentions for using the image matter, because different audiences will each want their own kind of picture.

Mirrorless cameras drain batteries constantly, so it may seem odd that the majority of early models had small batteries compared with DSLRs. They contributed to the lightness and portability of the cameras when they were groundbreaking. Here’s a Sony Alpha 900 DSLR battery, alongside the much smaller cell used in early Alpha 7 bodies.

Then, you may need an innovative technical approach to achieve your end. During lockdown, I think I wrote in a blog about the Pikes Peak Hill Climb and the Audi Quattro: a very traditional American motorsport event, dominated by big V8 engines and rear-wheel drive. Until, one year, a European manufacturer took along a 4-wheel drive supercar with a five-cylinder turbocharged engine of a little over 2 litres, and wiped the floor. In camera terms, that’s what Sony has done to the DSLR in the last 10 years… Once one player has produced the innovation and trumped the old way of working, everyone adopts the new way of doing things – in this case, mirrorless full-frame cameras.

Beta testing and trend-setting aren’t without risk. Road-going Audi Quattros crashed remarkably often in their early days, as owners failed to realise that their remarkable grip didn’t mean that they could defy the laws of physics, and hitting the brakes in the middle of a fast corner had the same effect as in any other vehicle.

Mirrorless cameras offer the same sort of game-changing technology as Audi’s four-wheel drive: but complex AWD systems need expert maintenance, and small, light cameras with small, light batteries and live view running all the time they’re switched on need two, three or four spare batteries while a DSLR runs all day on a single cell, and there’s a steep learning curve with some functions. But users learn, and second and third-generation cameras transform the weaknesses.

When should you not be beige, aesthetically? That’s entirely up to you – if all you want to do is make a reasonable record of what you see, you never need to venture outside your comfort zone. In club competitions, maybe you need to play the man and not the ball – if you want to win, tune your images to what you know about the judge’s taste.

Coloured lights don’t even need to be in focus to be rather beautiful…

But if you are interested in making images that are different, maybe it won’t matter what anyone thinks if you make a picture exactly the way that you want to. Scarlet and purple will be brilliant, quite literally! Often, good and bad taste are separated by a hair’s breadth, but not always: my wife likes tastefully coordinated Christmas decorations, while I tend to side with my daughter, who prefers more colours! If someone invented a rainbow with 8 colours, she wants one (who said ‘octarine’?)

One portrait of Em Yang, with four treatments – from left to right, the completely straight view, followed by heavy dark and light vignettes. The version on the right has a slight vignette – I hope enough to enhance the view of Em without overpowering the image in any way. Maybe subtle enough that you wouldn’t really notice the vignette?

One area where fading to grey is highly disputable is with vignettes. Light or dark, they present a hazard that the photographer needs to negotiate carefully. Using the wrong vignette (a light one on a low-key picture, for instance) will get in the way of the subject matter, and be a real visual blocker. As with many other tweaks and effects, the ideal may be that the viewer doesn’t really notice the result… I know a photographer whose style often consists of a heavy grey vignette spreading across the frame, and while it’s the making of a few pictures, it becomes like those chirpy little sequences that pop up at the beginning and end of every segment of some TV programmes – you know the things I mean: ‘Sillysods on Telly s sponsored by Run-a-wreck Taxis’.

Keeping it tasteful – Joceline…

Like so many other aspects of our passion for making photographs, ‘beige’ is something that can be a very positive choice. No risks are needed when there’s a high cost to failure, and no special reward for high art: but when you are looking to be the most creative person you can be, then you should bring out the unusual, the neglected, and the things you’ve been practising on quiet evenings when Sillysods on Telly gets too much for you.

So whether your equipment is beige or cutting-edge, get out there and take pictures. Hone your techniques carefully, and then take some artistic risks – and maybe submit your favourite image to that competition, instead of the one that you know everybody will like…