This weekend I was helping Tim at Railex (helping in the loosest term – I was there anyway!) and had a very interesting chat with a chap about lighting on layouts. He explained that lighting is what he does and he was obviously somewhat of an authority on the subject.

Anyway the subject of this image came up, Apologies for posting it again, I get people are probably sick of seeing it but I have added a bit of rain as some people asked for it.  He explained that sodium lighting on a scale of colour gives a very high spike in the yellow range and doesn’t output any other colours. For this image to have the colours it does it would need a white light source, I cant say its the moon because its raining!  It actually does have a white light source as I have a string of dim-able LEDs on the wall of the shed that I use to infill my night pictures.  He very obviously knew exactly what he was on about!  People may have noticed that at night we sometimes see in black and white.  It was something I was already aware about on a very basic level.  Cameras are much better at picking up colour in low light than the human eye as anyone who recently saw and photographed the northern lights probably noticed.

So I could say that the above image has a certain degree of artistic licence to it.  Or at least I could if it was deliberate but the reality is it wasn’t.  I hate it when people throw the term artistic licence around to justify missing something or some sort of mistake after its been pointed out.  It’s OK to miss things, just don’t try and claim it was deliberate after the event.

So by taking all of the colour out except yellow (and putting some back in for the lorry lights and inside the phone box) we have an image that more accurately depicts what you would see if you were really standing on a rain sodden bridge in the Black Country at the end of the 1950’s.  Two questions now though, The first is which of the two is actually the more pleasing, or nicer image? and the second is anyone actually bothered?