playing around with ultraviolet

[solarbird]

 
low light and normal light

Friends held a solstice party and traditionally it's held in the dark except for lights people bring, so I made hidden (in my cuffs) LED ultraviolet light emitters ("blacklight") and drank drinks mixed with tonic water so they would fluoresce.

Also I could point at things and they'd glow. (Sometimes.)

It's much more violet than it looks in these pictures, I'm not sure what's up with my camera making it so blue. But it might be because I see ultraviolet as, well, violet, but more.

(I'm always the one playing with UV at these things, because I'm the one who can actually see it. But everyone can see the other bits, and also, these LEDs also put out a bit of just straight up visible violet-range light, probably so people with conventional vision can see they're on.)

Comments

[tornir]

Camera sensors are reactive to IR/UV wavelengths humans can't see, and their image encoding format is restricted to storing information for only red, green, and blue. To prevent the image looking odd, the sensors have a cut filter fitted which blocks out those extra wavelengths, so what's being recorded is only the colours most people see.

[solarbird]

Oh, I know.

I had fights about colour all through art school. And I always struggled to get flower photographs that matched what I saw. Took forever to figure out why, but eventually, I did.