The Visual Toolbox: 60 Lessons for Stronger Photographs

Lesson 17. Consider Your Color Palette

One of the things you’ll consistently notice about the bodies of work of photographers who’ve been doing this a while is that many of them, though not all, seem to work very intentionally to create a consistency within a body of work—some kind of unifying element. Often that element revolves around a theme, so it’d be a body of work about the female nude figure, for example. That theme alone can create a visual unity. Another way of doing the same thing is with consistency in other constraints, like a shared crop ratio, such as every image being square or 4:5, for example.

Nikon D3s, 140mm, 1/8000 @ f/5.6, ...