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I love this place at night. When it's empty.
(Photo: d.)
But then movies have their own authenticity; for an Angeleno steeped in them, they become as real as the city outside. When Michael Mann made the movie Collateral, one of his goals was to make nighttime Los Angeles a character, and the city’s lights—shot with a dizzying array of digital technology—have never looked better. Mann started his career on Miami Vice and made the heist movie Heat; he is arguably Hollywood’s king of depicting cities at night. But the effect he creates is just that—an effect. Mann thought the combination of LA’s actual sources of illumination looked weird on his monitors; he and his crew tweaked it in post-production to look “real.”
Lights are not the same as movies of lights. And memories of lights and movies? That’s a whole other thing. Color and the memory of color, already filtered by the eye and brain, dance a few steps even further away from whatever we might call the color of reality when recorded by technology, by a camera. “Remembrance of the city is mediated by a technology that is itself sensitive to the way the light is produced,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at Wellesley College who studies color and vision. “In very blunt terms, there’s a difference between your experience of the sodium light and your experience of a picture or movie shot using sodium illumination.”
To Conway, the key is that trick the human visual system plays. It’s called color constancy. In essence, it’s the ability of the eye and visual cortex to correct for the color of illumination that’s spilling across a scene and reflecting back to an observer. Most of the time, humans can subtract the “spectral bias” of a source.
Occasionally, artificial or external effects break color constancy—accidentally, as with the dress, or intentionally, in the theater or a movie. Our brains “see” a color that isn’t really there. Different light sources can set off the same color coding in the eye under one set of conditions, but not another. Look at a shirt in the store and it matches your pants; get it home and it doesn’t. Color constancy has played you for a patsy. “As you switch from one lighting condition to another, from sodium to LED, you are profoundly changing the way color objects appear,” Conway says. “And that’s huge. It’s going to change the associations people make.”
Sodium lights are effectively monochromatic, which means that while you can see by them, you essentially have no color vision, though just as in dim lighting you’re unlikely to notice. As with black-and-white images, Conway argues, memories add a kind of personal retrospective colorization, but LEDs drag everything into full color. “I wonder whether your nostalgia for sodium-illuminated LA has something to do with this,” Conway emails later, after we talk. “Under sodium lights, you can experience the city with your own private visualized colors, and these don’t align with the real colors given to you with LED lights. It’s disappointing, just as seeing a movie based on a favorite book is rarely satisfying.”
On September 1st 1971, the sole remaining gas street lamp in Glasgow was lit for the last time.
It always surprises me that gas lighting was still around as recently as 1971, I know I never witnessed the "Leeries" doing their work, but many of you out there will no doubt recall them.
Every street in every town, and every city around Scotland and indeed the world were first lit by gas, the first street I grew up in had the big concrete poles that had the large electric light on top.
Gas street lights were introduced to Glasgow in 1818 by the Glasgow Gas-Light Co. The Glasgow Police Act of 1866 authorised the Police Board to install lighting in streets, courts and common stairs.
In 1869 the city acquired Glasgow's two gas companies and by 1870 the Gas Department had installed up 10,657 street lights and 17,284 stair lights in the city. By 1914 there were 19,437 gas lamps in the city's public streets, and 1,541 electric lamps. In the private streets and courts there were 6,527 gas lamps and 126 electric lamps. The Corporation employed 1,050 workers in the Lighting Department alone!
The first electric lights were introduced to Glasgow in 1893 but it took 78 years for the last gas light to be extinguished. As electricity became more popular, gas lights were phased out. By 1955 the Corporation maintained 7,723 gas lights compared to 33,186 electric street lights.
Gas lighting continued in Glasgow until at least the mid 70's but only in the closes. Most of the stairs had gas lamps on each floor, but some had been converted to electricity and needed a triangular key to turn them on and off so no self timers back then.
Cambrian Road, Richmond
Artist: Spencer Frederick Gore (British, 1878–1914)
Date: 1913-1914
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, United States
Description
In order to escape the pollution of central London in 1913, Spencer Gore moved his young family to Cambrian Road, a pleasant street of Victorian terraced villas in suburban Richmond. Gore took this street as his subject in a number of paintings that same year. He had long been interested in the latest French art, having been introduced to the impressionists by Walter Sickert in 1904. By 1913 he had become enamored with the work of Paul Cézanne and began experimenting with angular patches of color in his work in imitation of Cézanne’s approach. Despite seeking the new suburban dream, a vision captured in this view of his own tree-lined street, Gore died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-five, less than a year after moving to Richmond.
Red Sky at Night - Linden Frederick , 2022.
American, b. 1953 -
Oil on linen , 27 x 42 in. 68.6 x 106.7 cm.
Inside Givendale Chapel, East Riding of Yorkshire, England.
British town, village in Netherlands find a happy middle ground.
Excerpt from this story from Mother Nature Network:
A sustainable neighborhood in the Dutch town of Nieuwkoop is leaving on the welcome light for bats. And if all goes well, they'll never even notice it.
The groundbreaking initiative, a culmination of more than five years of research on the impact of artificial light on nocturnal species, uses street lighting that features a specialized bat-friendly recipe of LEDs. Unlike the LED lighting many of us are familiar with, this particular network of lights glows with a somewhat eerie red hue. To light-sensitive bats and other nocturnal creatures, however, this specialized spectrum preserves the night conditions critical to their well-being.
"Bats don't see red light as particularly bright, if they see it at all," Maurice Donners, a senior scientist and innovation specialist at Signify, which designed the new streetlights, told Fast Company. "So if you have certain bat species that are really avoiding light, we thought the obvious thing to do was take a portion of red light which is visible to us, but is much less visible, or perhaps even invisible, to bats."
The motivating factor behind embracing the new streetlights came after Nieuwkoop decided to create a new neighborhood of 89 homes near a nature reserve for rare and threatened species. Besides committing the development to the highest sustainability standards possible, officials also discovered that the neighboring reserve was home to a large population of light-sensitive bats.
Fast-forward to 2019, when Worcestershire County Council in the United Kingdom picked up on this concept and ran with it. They are using the red LED streetlights to install what they're calling the U.K.'s first bat-friendly highway. As Melissa over on TreeHugger explains, it's a smart way to keep notoriously light-shy bats connected to their food sources.
Though not yet complete, the project started when the community recognized the need to light a previously unlit area for a pedestrian crossing. But adding traditional white lighting would have changed the bat's range — with devastating consequences. Just as wildlife corridors and turtle tunnels give animals a way to get what they need — food, water, safety — without interacting with dangerous humans, the bat-friendly highway will accomplish the same goal.
