Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2011/01/28
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Other than the possible fact that the envelopes might actually reflect whiter than the snow . . . Sunlight is rather blue in the spectrum. (When I was working in film production, making commercials, those little nuances could really take you for a ride.) In the house, you don't have that direct comparison, the light sources will be mixed, so your brain will give you a white envelope, just like you want it to be. On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Lawrence Zeitlin <lrzeitlin at gmail.com>wrote: > Yesterday afternoon, when shoveling our recent 15" snowfall off the > driveway, I paused at the mailbox to get the day's mail. I set the letters > down on the snowbank to close the box when I noticed that all the white > envelopes appeared a pale shade of blue. When I took them in the house they > appeared normally white. While I have no definitive explanation for the > "blue" envelopes, I have written before that the eye, mediated by the > brain, > does not see reality but sees what it expects to see. We alter the visual > scene until it conforms to our expectations. Colors are viewed in their > "proper" hues despite ambient illumination, shapes are altered, sizes > changed to offset their diminishment by perspective, and so on. Reality is > in our mind, not in the objective scene. > > All I can suggest is that after a couple of hours of shoveling I expected > the snow to be white despite the fact that it was yellow tinged because of > the late afternoon sun. By shifting the color balance of the scene to meet > my expectations, perhaps the truly white envelopes were shifted into the > blue. Does anyone have an explanation? > > Larry Z > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information > -- Regards, Sonny http://sonc.com/look/ Natchitoches, Louisiana USA