Great Basin School of Photography

The sun's light is made up of all the colors of the rainbow, but a clear sky scatters blue light, making it appear blue.  That blue light can also be reflected back out of lakes, making them often appear blue as well.  At sunset the blue light becomes even more scattered, enabling red, orange and yellow to dominate the light reaching our eyes.  

The human perceptual system handles the changing light conditions by trying to assign the brightest light to white, coloring our perception of everything else around us.  Further complicating the situation, we have only limited capacity to notice and remember color.  What color is snow?  Everyone knows that it's white.  Yet if you look at it on a clear day and pay close attention, it's often a blue-white.  When you notice that the light in the shadows on snow are very blue, it becomes apparent that you can see something like snow your whole life but never fully notice or comprehend its color.  We're just not tuned to notice it.  It gets even worse when you try to remember color.  If you didn't notice it, you can't remember it.  But even when you're trying your hardest to remember, some tests have estimated that while we can discriminate between millions of shades of color, when it comes to recalling those we actually have the ability to discriminate about 17 colors accurately from memory. Yet we know we can see rich colors, so in a stunning lack of awareness of our limitations, most people believe that they can remember a wide range of colors too.

In landscape photography we encounter interesting situations, like that example of shadows on snow, when the blue light of the sky lights things differently.  Whether we notice or remember it or not.  Fortunately a digital camera is not biased like our perception and forgetful like our memory.  Digital cameras are designed to measure the colors of incoming light and to approximate our "white balance" distortions of color so the photo will look something like what we might perceive onsite, but the process has its limits, and will not consistently produce natural-looking results in difficult lighting situations.  And even if it did, what we perceive is not what's there.  

So photographers have to choose between the straight output of a device that doesn't see or perceive in any way like our visual system, their severely limited but overly confident memory of the colors which were present, creating an artistic interpretation of the moment, or some combination of the three.  

Deep in a red rock slot canyon like this, the light bouncing off the walls quickly takes on orange to red tones, but light coming directly down from the sky is blue, which can mix with reflected red-orange light to create shades of purple.  Fortunately a digital camera typically records the full range of colors, whether or not we saw (perceived) or noticed the colors at the time, and whether or not we remember them now.  So the camera gives us the ability to explore what was actually there, free from the limitations of our perception or recall.

Blue Sky Light in the Canyon – Antelope Canyon, Lake Powell Navajo Tribal Park, Arizona

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