Ok - this might seem like a really strange way to kick off the
series proper, but trust me, there's a reason for it. And this article is also technically "
Photographing Miniatures 6: White Balance", for reasons which will become rapidly apparent.
To start with, then - how do we see colour? Why is a leaf green?
When light falls on something, three things happen to varying degrees depending on the colour/wavelength of light, namely it can be absorbed, scattered, or reflected. Reflected we'll leave for later (see... ohhh, I dunno? Water? Glass?) but what's scattered and what's absorbed determine its colour.
White light -
pure white light - is made up of a spectrum of colours, as per the classic prism demonstration. If you look at your TV, your computer screen, or a LED colour-changing light, closely, you'll see that in fact you can make white (in fact most colours) from a
combination of various proportions of red, green and blue (have a play with the link).
So, why are leaves green? Because they've
evolved to absorb the red and blue ends of the spectrum for photosynthesis, and scatter the rest, i.e. green wavelengths - result? A green leaf [1]. If something absorbs all wavelengths, it'll be black - and often that means it absorbs the infra-red off the red end of the spectrum as well, and is why black objects get hotter in the sun.
However... the important thing to note is that an object can only scatter what's falling on it. Allow me to demonstrate, with the aid of a camera, my shiny new LED colour-changing living room lights (which use combinations of red, green and blue to make a wide spectrum of possible colours), and a colour balance test card.
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The card under 'pure' white.
For the colour-blind (like my wife) the strips are:
top to bottom left:
blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, grey.
middle small strips:
white, black, cyan, black, magenta, grey, blue
right side:
black, 3 narrow shades of dark grey, black, purple, white, dark blue |
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| Red light |
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Green light (not very good green, more a sickly greenish-
white, but it's the best the fittings will do) |
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| Blue light |
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| Purple light |
Neat, huh? Notice how the white stops being white, because there isn't a full rainbow of colour for it to reflect, and how all the other colours change. Also notice how, for example, you can't pick out the red from the white under red light [2].
Which leads us to the question in the title. Let's have a look again at the test card under fluorescent light, and under warm and cold white from the living room lights.
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Very 'Warm' white light (as far down the 'warm' end as my
lights will let me). |
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| About the equivalent of old-school incandescent lights |
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| About the same as natural sunlight. |
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| Natural shade (a very 'cold' blue white). |
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| Under the fluorescents in the kitchen :D |
The interesting thing is that what you see in the photos is NOT how your brain processes what your eyes give you - if you looked at any of those in isolation, your brain would correct for the white, as cameras can be set up to do automatically or manually. In this case, obviously, I've deliberately set the camera
not to compensate for the different lighting: it's locked to 'daylight in the shade' as that's what I had it set to for the light at Partizan, and you will notice that (for example) the card under the fluorescent strips in our kitchen has a noticeable orange cast, because there's not enough blue wavelengths in the output from the tube).
Of course, how YOU see the above images will also depend on what your monitor thinks 'white' is :D
[1] So why do blue and yellow paint (as opposed to light) make green?
[2] My wife once wrote a set of crib notes for a set list with our band in red ink. You can imagine her consternation when the stage lights turned out to be predominantly red.
[There is a theory afoot that the Warhammer Fantasy and 40K worlds are typically a few inches of topsoil laid on top of a couple of feet, or more, of skulls - either that or there are naturally occurring open-cast skull mines. Either way, this doesn't match the geology of the Iberian Peninsula!]
Managed to unearth some lightweight filler, so these are now out in the workshop (which is fortunately warm today) to dry.
Anyone any good tips on removing PVA-attached grass? My immediate thought is get it very wet.
When light falls on something, three things happen to varying degrees depending on the colour/wavelength of light, namely it can be absorbed, scattered, or reflected. Reflected we'll leave for later (see... ohhh, I dunno? Water? Glass?) but what's scattered and what's absorbed determine its colour.
...and a very pleasant day chatting with folks, taking photos and helping run our Men Who Would Be Kings game with AndyH, AndyMac, Ash and Pippa. Huge thanks to Osprey, who've been letting us run amok with a pre-release version of the rules for a while now.
Were I considering a Kings of War Undead army, which I was for a while, I'd definitely go for some of these.
The thud of a parcel on the mat, and that unmistakable aroma of freshly-lasered MDF...
There are distinct advantages to having a wife who's a role-player and boardgamer.
