I thought better of heading down to Felixstowe this morning. I really did not want my gear ending up in the North Sea unlike my fellow photographer in the last post. The wind had been quite gusty overnight but nothing like the Outer Hebrides. What an awful Shipping Forecast this morning.

I did experiment with White Balance settings yesterday. Colour is always subjective and the late Jane Bown claimed it got in the way with her portrait work but nighttime industrial images cry out for colour. That said it is a known fact that our cones are less receptive than our rods in the dark and we all see colour differently. I used to work with someone who swore blind his briefcase was grey when it was malachite green but colour blindness I am led to believe is more prominent in men than women. Three years getting ‘my eye in’ in the colour darkrooms at UCS re-inforced the difficulty of getting colour balanced correctly.

For daylight images I don’t have a problem. I usually , in my landscape images, find something neutral like galvanised metal to work on. If I can get that looking right then the rest of the image falls into place. Of course, colour temperature changes by the minute if not second and that is readily apparent at either end of the day. I think there is a degree of artistic lincence with nighttime images that allows the artist to stretch the representation of either the emulsion or the sensor to deliver quite radically different looks and feels.

These contact sheets show for the main the same image with different neutral points sampled to alter the white balance.