“The nature of light is a subject of no material importance to the concerns of life or to the practice of the arts, but it is in many other respects extremely interesting.”
Thomas Young’s quote humoured me as I began this week’s readings. It sparked thoughts about how important light really is to our lives. Light has so much to do with color as we have read in Livingstone’s early chapters and color impacts art in regards to aesthetics, for example take a black and white photograph or print and put it next to a fully coloured version of that same print and the images/ artwork look completely different and give the viewer different feelings about the work. I believe this is true especially with photography. Acquiring or not acquiring the proper light is essential to a quality photograph. You have to catch the right wave atop the present subject at the appropriate time of day, which brings the sun in to play. Depending upon the type of mood or angle you want to achieve light is important to color.
While reading Vision and Art a statement that Livingstone makes about the colors we see in butterfly wings, pearls, opals, hummingbird and peacock feathers, representing the diffraction of colors, also known as interference reminded me of the differentiation in the color of flames. When you turn on a gas stove the flames are a hue of blue. When flames are viewed on a larger scale they look orangish red in color. Granted the interference Livingstone is referring to is the tiny glare that is usually best seen from a spherical view, meaning the circumference of a pearl or the ocellus of a peacock feather. Can this interference of light be viewed differently or inaccurately? Livingstone states that most people have three cone types categorized by wavelength long, middle, and short also referred to by color red, green and blue. What if a person is looking at a pearl or butterfly wings and their yellow cone is impaired, how would this affect the neuron signal? This person would not be able to distinguish the yellow wavelength, so what would he or she see no color at all in place of the yellow or simply a more intensified experience of blue and red? At least this is true for me yet then again we all see things differently. I was wondering if this change of color in flames due to interference as well or is it due to some other properties related to the refraction of light or none of the above?
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Livingstone gave a good explanation of the basic biology of the eye following her description of what light actually is. I'm also curious about your flame question because I know that blue flame is hotter than orange... which makes me wonder if there is some sort of inverted relationship between heat and color. It's not entirely clear to me, but I know it's related!
ReplyDeleteWouldn't impairment of one cone type effect the ratio that enables us to distinguish wavelength? It seems that between the rods and existing cones the brain would compensate and "create" the missing input based on the remaining cones and the existing rods. Again, not sure, but I think that unless the damage was neurological that given enough time the body/brain would learn to work around those impairments.
The flame question is explained well in the Webexhibit, Causes of Color:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/3BA.html
I will discuss the color appearance effects of missing or mutated cones in detail in class tomorrow.
I did a little research and found that the color of a flame has to do with the type of materials burning, the intensity of the flame, and any impurities in the burning material. As far as Samantha's comment in relation to heat and color, I found that the color varies according to the distance from the center of the flame. A blue gas flame is a total combustion of the material while an orange flame is not.
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