Canon Club Challenge winner: Colourful portraits with personality with Bernard Vaquer

The challenge, Colourful Portraits with Personality, was set by portrait and events photographer Corinne Cumming. The brief was simply to create your brightest, boldest portrait of a person or group, and use colour with intent.

The winning image, chosen by fellow Canon Club members through community voting, came from French photographer Bernard Vaquer. His portrait, La femme au filet, is immediately striking: it’s rich in colour, calm in mood, and full of quiet presence.

“Colour in the composition of an image represents the essential element of the image,” Bernard says. “Today, I attach more importance to composition and colour than to the act of taking the picture itself.”

Bernard has been passionate about photography since childhood. He started at the age of 16 with a Canon AE-1, developing his first images in a makeshift darkroom. Although he didn’t make photography his career, he returned to it seriously in retirement, studying for several years at the ENSP (the National School of Photography) in Arles, where he learned to use Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom1 and deepened his understanding of image-making and composition. That background helps explain why this portrait feels so carefully built.

The image began with a travel photograph taken on a Canon EOS-1D X. From there, Bernard worked on it to bring it closer to the picture he had in mind: one with a younger subject with a broader smile, a gentler gaze and a subtle tilt of the head to draw the eye and soften the intimacy of the moment.

The result is a portrait that feels both immersive and controlled. What makes it so memorable is the colour contrast. Layers of blue netting in the foreground and background wrap the frame in texture and create a cocoon-like atmosphere. The cool turquoise-blue of the nets is set against the deep red of the clothing. Bernard says this harmony of complementary colours was one of the most important factors in the picture.

The composition is also key. The subject is placed along a strong composition line but slightly to the right, which stops the frame from feeling too symmetrical, while the netting itself creates soft visual lines that guide your eye back towards her face and hands.

The emotional tone matters just as much as the palette. Despite all that texture, nothing feels busy. The expression is gentle, the light is soft, and the framing keeps the viewer close to the subject. It’s a good reminder that portraits with personality don’t always need dramatic gestures or exaggerated styling. Sometimes personality comes through in atmosphere, restraint, and the way colours and shapes work together.

The starting image was taken on a Canon EOS-1D X with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, but Bernard is open about the role post-production played in shaping the portrait. Having worked through the eras of darkroom printing and digital retouching, he sees today’s AI tools as part of a longer evolution in image-making.

“In film photography, you had to create masks, gradients, grain and so on in order to alter an image,” he says. “With Photoshop¹, you needed to know selections, adjustment layers, curves and selective adjustments." Today, he sees AI as a tool to be mastered, not simply to change an image but to structure an image step by step to reach the composition, framing, and colour harmony he imagined from the start.

Bernard's advice is to think beyond the instant of capture and focus on what the image is really trying to convey. For him, photography has something in common with painting: it isn’t only about recording what was there.

“As a painter transcribes a landscape, the photographer also transcribes an impression, a feeling, a moment,” he says. “And if the viewer is attracted by that view, then it’s a success.”

In that vein, pay attention to colour relationships. Think carefully about composition. Consider how expression, posture, and framing guide the eye. And above all, ask what kind of emotional response you want the image to create.

Head to Canon Club to enter the next challenge – or, you can vote for your favourite images even if you don’t submit an entry yourself.