Colours can evoke feelings and stir emotions within us, the impressionist painters used this to good effect within their paintings and the placement of hues within a scene created atmosphere that could give depth to shadows, enhance a narrative and facilitate the eyes movement around a painting.
We have strong emotions attached to colour like we do with music and can use that knowledge in photography to deliberately stir an emotion and enhance a message we are trying to convey. The obvious metaphor is that red is hot and blue is cold but even with that simple example we can play on the visual palette to invoke a message without using any words.
These images of wine were used as the leading pages in a brochure to categorise different sections for Gold, Silver and Bronze, no text was used on the pages allowing the colours to lead the narrative. The gold and the bronze are subtle changes in hue and were easy to shoot as the bottles are a similar colour to the awards they represented, however silver is more difficult to portray with red wine as its almost completely opposite to the tonality of silver. By adding a subtle blue gel to certain areas it has shifted the feeling from warm to a cooler metallic tone without removing the essence of the red wine.
By using colour with intention in an image we can enhance a message, invoke taste buds and stir emotions, it will create connections within the brain by activating senses other than sight and your products and services will have a stronger anchor to be remembered by.