Hey there, again.
I'm wondering who influence you and your interest in color/colour?
Me. I was somewhat interested when i photographed swirling water. Then later it was artist from the impressionist era. Monet, Manet, Sargent, Casset, The list goes on and includes Georgia O'keefe. Then, I found work by Eliot Porter and then knew I had a shot of experimenting with my camera and color photography.
So what about you?

Early colour inspires me most
Albert Kahn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kahn_(banker))
And Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky
Like you quite a bit of my colour interest is from art I have already mentioned Josef Albers:
http://www.albersfoundation.org/Albers.php?inc=Galleries&i=J_1

Nice color work, Mark. Your flower image is very brilliant. I like the Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii article was interesting as well. I really like the Autochrome image of Tolstoy. Love the color and clarity.

More and more, I am finding that music relates best to my (more abstract) colour photography. I wrote a bit about that in a recent blog. Here is a youtube clip that says a lot of what I think about the relationship between colour and sound:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcigKVyqsMM

I look to influences like this to nudge my thinking about more abstract colour.

That's interesting. Bruce Barnbaum, who is a B&W photographer also says that music influences his work. That is why he has two books that have a music cd attached to them.
I would say that music has a pull on me but not as color. More about doing photography. I happen to like Aaron Copeland's music or other American composers.
Like the You tube link.

Like most photographers, I have a couple of folks whose colour work I admire. For colour landscape work, Eliot Porter and David Meunch (correct spelling?) come quickly to mind. For general colour work, Jay Maisel and Pete Turner are long-time favourites. Less directly, perhaps, are the influences of the other arts: music, literature and certain painters have often served to direct my attention toward certain subject matter as well as influenced how I see things...

Honestly, I couldn't name a photographer that inspired me. It was more the art itself. The ability to capture a moment fascinated and captivated me. Even as a kid growing up when all I had was a cheap plastic 110 film cassette camera, it was still something I wanted to do.

I know I'm worse off for not being able to appreciate some of the masters of the art. What inspired me most was looking at photos of extended family that I never met personally... seeing baby pictures of myself and my siblings... seeing family portraits and how we changed over time. Actually fingering through stacks of these photos did more for me than looking at the awe-inspiring photos on the cover of TIME magazine and so forth.