Week 4: What is White?

Islay after Sunset

I took the photo above when I was home in San Luis Obispo last weekend, just after sunset. I ended up loving the unusual lighting in the image, and thought I should share it here. There are two initially striking things happening for me- the shapes within the light, and the creation of contrasting colors within two sources which would typically be perceived as “white light.”

In terms of shape, the silhouette of the house is very sharp because the subject is backlit by the west setting sun. The sky almost looks like a cyc, and the windows look like lamps with sharp shutter edges, cutting clean lines into the color. Emotionally, this photograph creates an interesting dichotomy. The light in the house seems warm and inviting. The vast and shrinking blue sky behind the house seem cool, natural and wild. The shape of the trees beside the house make is seem like a oasis of warmth in a cool and almost wild area. 

The lights inside of the house were your standard A type incandescent, and while inside the house, the lights appeared white and perhaps a bit yellow. The photo is unedited, and it appears orange and blue. While outside in the yard, the sky appeared grey, but compared against the windows, the sky looks blue. Compared against the sky in the photo, the windows look orange. Try covering up the windows in the photograph for a minute, the sky becomes grey and desaturated. 

It is so strange to me how the our eye adjusts to make neutral light white. But when two very different “white” lights are compared, they look like brilliant hues. How confusing, but how interesting, that our eyes and our brains create a “new normal” for which to measure from. This concept is so intriguing to me in terms of color theory. Is all color relative only to whatever we are currently perceiving as white? What are the boundaries?

I included the photograph below, which I took at Newport Beach, because it has a really really similar gradient, color palette and silhouette effect as the photo above. Except that the entire color range is naturally occurring rather than stemming from both a natural and an artificial source. I'm not sure what to make of that. Food for thought.

Newport after Sunset