Being a Colour Blind Photographer

I struggle with colour, there, I’ve said it. I’ve always had problems with distinguishing colours, much to my parents’ and teachers’ chagrin. With my particular flavour of colour vision deficiency, I can’t put a name to non-primary colours, and so I’m not sure if things are reddish, bluish, greeny-brown, and so on.

As a kid, I loved painting and drawing and would often paint in fantastical colours, so faces could be red/purple and grass, deep yellows. Those colours felt right to me but were wrong according to others.

Fast forward a few decades, and I was working in design, and thank goodness for the advent of computer-aided design tools such as Photoshop. Built into these were eyedropper tools that told you colours as numbers or hex codes. I can still recite colours and their hex values 😀.

I managed to hide my severe form of colour blindness for years, and then as I began photographing more, graduating from working only in black and white to photographs that used colour to give information to the viewer, my attitude changed. I began to be open with clients, and in studio settings, everyone knew I was colour blind. The hair, makeup, and assistants all knew and offered help. They advised if colours were going a little too wacky and made suggestions. And people would say they liked the ‘team’ atmosphere on my shoots.

Truth is, you can be colour blind and be a professional photographer 🤟🏽.

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