Since sliding gently from summer into autumn on Wednesday, the weather has been perfect. Today, the sun shone brightly in a cloudless sky with the temperature reaching an extremely pleasant +22C. Just before leaving home this morning, I espied the neighbour across the road exercising his flock of pigeons.Round and round they flew, and as their wings caught the direct blast of the sun's rays, there was a sudden flash of purest white that a moment later disappeared as the birds darted up at a different angle. A most beautiful sight at any time of the year, but one predicated by the brilliance of a blue sky as background and a lack of clouds occluding the sun.
Do the birds feel the same joy as we humans do in the presence of the sun? Is it sunlight or high air pressure accompanying cloudless skies that raises our spirits? I would posit that all surface-dwelling creatures within our universe feel elation in the vigorous presence of their local star's benign rays. Not burning at this time of year, but warming and life-enhancing. Look at the spiders in their webs (nowhere nearly as big this year as they were last year), ants and beetles. All seem to express greater joy and vibrance in their movements when the sun shines on their backs.
Incidentally, the pictures above are 'as was' without any tweaking whatsoever in Photoshop - and no polarising filter. The sky was indeed this blue. Nikkor 80-400mm at 400mm.
The sky was indeed this blue.
ReplyDeleteColour is a very subjective matter, but even so I suspect that may observers comparing the Warsaw sky that morning with your photograph, as seen on their monitors, would find the latter 'bluer'.
Why? Because there is a lot of UV light knocking around in a cloudless sky which our cameras register as extra blue, but which is completely invisible to the naked eye.
Chemicals which turn UV light into white light are the reason that some washing powders actually do wash 'whiter than white'.
I was hoping for a comment on this subject! The sky is the bluest when looking away from the sun. Indeed, if you point your thumb at the sun with your palm perpendicular to the ground, your index finger at 90 degrees to your thumb, the finger will point to the bluest region of the sky. It was against this part of the sky that I photographed the pigeons. Their whiteness also fools the light meter into stopping down a third to half an f-stop, rendering the blue more saturated. But for maximum blueness, point a wide angle lens at the bluest part of the sky and use a polarising filter.
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