Week 3: Clouds and Colors

I took this photo while walking to class on Thursday afternoon, and I was struck by how muted everything looked. We've been getting so much heat and sunlight these past few days, which made the world outside look so bright and colorful. The sky was a bright blue, the leaves on the trees and the bushes were a vibrant green, and the paint on the buildings in Claire Trevor shone with bold colors; everything had a dazzling, vivid quality to it. The world outside on Thursday was a stark contrast to the bright world I'd grown accustomed to in the days before. Instead of a intense blue, the sky was cloudy and gray, and the colors of the plants and buildings were a lot cooler in comparison to how they'd been the past few days; it was almost as though someone had turned down the "saturation" setting in a photo editing app. It was interesting to observe how this affected my mood-- there's been a lot on my mind these past couple weeks, and the dull-looking world outside seemed to put me in a more pensive and thoughtful mood than usual. I wonder if it was because there weren't bright colors to distract me from my thoughts, or maybe because we tend to associate grays and cool tones with solemnity and warmer, brighter colors with happiness, like how somber scenes in film and television are often colored with a blue tint.