Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. A histogram of the first grey card image above shows narrow peaks for blue, green and red with little in between.

It does seem odd to me that the new LED (?) fittings that have been installed here have a colour temperature around that of tungsten lamps (3300 degK), so odd in fact that I've just spawned an email to Oldham MBC street lighting department asking them to clarify what is (should have been?) installed.

Andrew

The LED lamps installed here look slightly orangey not white. They do, though, look a little whiter than my car headlights.

It is very difficult to say exactly what the grey card really looks like under the LED lighting. I've just been out again and had another look. It does not look grey and is definitely orangey - but I cannot say for certain that it looked exactly like the first image above. The brain has a habit of applying processing that make things look like you expect them to look, whether they really do or not.

I remember many years ago spending an afternoon in the lighting laboratory at the Moorlight Electrical factory which was only a couple of miles from Oldham. They had a number of identical colour charts in separate cubicles, each lit by a different light source - warm white, daylight, northlight and colour matching fluorescent tubes and tungsten lamps. If you looked at any one colour chart in isolation, you could have sworn that the colours were correctly portrayed - yet moving from one to the next displayed huge differences.

On balance, I think I'd trust the camera (on daylight WB) rather than my eyes to tell it like it really is.

Andrew

The shot was of an 18% grey card - so it should be ..... grey.

I took the original as RAW and processed it with a Daylight WB in PSE8. The image below was reprocessed from the RAW in camera with a WB of tungsten:.




The histogram looks pretty good - so, tungsten it is then. If you check the histogram for the "Daylight" version above, you'll see that the spectrum is not continuous. It has very narrow red, green and blue peaks with little in between.

One point I really should make is that I have seen some reports of LED lamps which look blueish - so there may be a number of types in use with different colour temperatures.


Andrew

As it's dark now, I popped out for another look. They definitely look whiter than any street lighting I've seen before - but still a little yellowish.

This is a photo of an 18% grey card taken a few moments ago, directly under a new LED street lamp. It was taken with a K200D on Av, with WB set on daylight, at ISO 1600 f5.6 1/6 sec.




It doesn't look so neutral to me, but presumably you'd get a much better result on AWB or with manual WB. If you look at the histogram, there's a lot of red and it's way short on blue.

Andrew

Contractors are in the middle of installing several tens of thousands of new LED street lighting columns in Oldham and Rochdale. They replaced the columns where I live some months back. To the naked eye, they definitely do not look blue nor do they look white. When they were first installed, I thought they were High Pressure Sodium lamps (SON) but a bit less orangey.

Colour rendering is, though, much better than the old monochromatic low pressure sodium (SOX) lamps we had before. Blue,brown and green bins now look roughly the colour they should be rather than all being a dark orange/brown.

As an aside, at the present state of the art, I do not think that LED lamps are more efficient than the sodium lamps they replace. They typically produce 75 lumens/watt. High pressure sodium produce 80-100 lumens/watt and the very orange low pressure sodium lamps around 140 lumens/watt.

Andrew

I think they tend to come off the mountains in the evening. I've seen wild deer from the road between Ardgour and Strontian a few times; also on the high route to Applecross (very regular in the late afternoon, I've heard) and on the mountain road to the Bridge of Balgie from Loch Tay. You can see farmed deer in lots of places - Glen Strathfarrar (a must visit!); Glen Etive and the road betweeen Acharacle and Loch Moidart come to mind. There used to be a deer sanctuary/park on the Schiehallion road south of Tummel Bridge - though I think that has now closed.

Andrew

There are wild deer all over the Highlands of Scotland, but you have to pick the right time of day (usually twilight) and be lucky and/or very patient to see them.

Andrew

Mine too.

Have you tried photographing Suilven from the north - around Lochinver or the road north toward Clachtoll? There is a viewpoint/carpark 3 or 4 miles up the road towards Clachtoll. You'll need a clear day and a long lens.

Love the photos.

Andrew

I have a Sigma 28-70mm f3.5-4.5 Epsilon that back focusses a little, especially close to. If/when I upgrade from the K200D I use, maybe I'll be able to fix that and it'll get some more use. It's a shame really, as it's very solidly constructed and in perfect condition.

Andrew

Lets me start by repeating what John said. The image is attractive and I do like it. Whilst I also acknowledge that only you can say whether the image is an accurate representation of what you saw, I assume that part of your purpose in posting the photo is to elicit best guesses as to whether the purple mist is "natural" (i.e. it looked like that) or whether it is a function of post-processing.

In pondering about that, I cannot help but wonder why the mist is still so purple towards the right of the photo when it is more in the shadow of the hill; why the side of the boat facing away from the setting sun is purple too; why the hill above the mist is purple and why there is more red in some of the stonework facing the viewer than you might imagine if it was lit mainly by the dusky blue sky behind the photographer.

With some trepidation, I am forced to admit that I think there is a possibility either that you used a FL-D or FL-W filter when you took the shot - or adjusted the colour balance in post-processing. Adding a little green readily restores the colour balance to how I imagine it might have really looked - but then again, I wasn't there.

Does it look natural? Maybe not. Does it matter - definitely not. It is an attractive photo.

Andrew