Thursday, September 10, 2020

White Balance Challenges in the End of Days



I'm sure you've seen the orange or red sky pictures from the West Coast yesterday because we're on fire right now. This terrifying/hilarious combination of Pantone insignia and the name they gave the color of the sky made me sad and laugh at the same time. 

I struggled mightily yesterday to take my own accurate pictures of the apocalyptic sky that I was seeing with my iPhone.  This 3 second long picture captures how the light looked out on my deck the best. All other color was muted and almost gone, there wasn't a lot of green available to see. It was boggling the camera because it's so weighted towards automatically messing with the white balance. It was so dark out that it kept switching over to night shooting mode. 

The skylight at the top of our stairs was a glowing rectangle of orange red which doesn't come through well in this picture. Eerie is a word. Discombobulating also works. 

This is how an unedited picture was turning out, and it just didn't capture the orange-ness or the darkness at all.

The next two pictures are my attempts to adjust the color to what my eyes were seeing. It was somewhere in-between these two. It varied a lot during the day, sometimes getting quite a bit darker. We had all the lights on inside, that's how little light was getting through. 
Now, I'm a person who really loves orange, and this is too much for me. It's like the whole world is early decorating for Halloween or to celebrate the SF Giants. I miss my blue skies, or my foggy skies, it's too much. Will it be like this every year now? It's hard to imagine it getting better because the climate has indeed changed. We're hotter, we're drier, and we're just going to keep burning, year after year.

What can I possibly do besides take pictures? 

Fire Drill Fridays - the Greenpeace supported, Jane Fonda protest movement

Listen to Jane be interviewed about Fire Drill Fridays and her new book about why she's working so hard on the issue What Can I Do? on this episode of the great podcast, Hysteria

I'm going to be reading Naomi Klein's book On Fire - The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal

In case you didn't see this video, check it out:



1 comment:

Jaye said...

Well, you did better than I did. I took photos and fell down the stairs. Thanks for the resources.