Sodium Vapor Lights

The Light Fantastic

But after the energy shocks of the 1970s, high-pressure sodium lights gradually took over the night. Following the economic imperative to use the most cost-effective lighting—high-pressure sodium lights consume half as much energy as mercury-vapor lamps and can last up to 16,000 hours longer—transportation departments and cities embraced sodium light. It was as though someone said “ Fiat lux sulfurea —“Let there be light from hell.” The relentless spread of sodium streetlights is documented in night photographs from space: New York City and Los Angeles are circuit boards of glowing orange, and Long Beach, one of the world’s busiest ports, is a flare of tarnished gold. It’s even worse in the United Kingdom, where 85 percent of streetlights use sodium. The jaundiced weirdness of sodium light has become a vexing challenge to photographers (one filmmaker, Tenolian Bell, called it “the ugliest light known to the cinematographer”); movie cameras simulate its color by using a gel filter named Bastard Amber. Significantly, retailers have avoided inflicting the unpleasantness of sodium lights on their customers—most commercial parking lots and shopping malls use the costlier white metal halide lights.

Our forced acceptance of sodium light’s ghoulish tint, an accident caused by the electrical vaporization of sodium metal in a gas-filled tube, makes outdoor lighting an example of a “bossy technology,” to borrow a term from Kevin Kelly’s recent book, What Technology Wants . Even worse than this inherent bossiness is the larger problem of light pollution. “Mankind is proceeding to envelop itself in a luminous fog,” wrote the authors of a paper on artificial night-sky brightness in 2001. This “perennial moonlight” that we’ve created enhances our safety and security, but it also dims our view of 10,000 stars and destroys the dance of light and dark.

But now we have a chance to bid good riddance to sodium vapor, and perhaps even resist the heedless trend of adding more and more light. The color of night is changing again.

A Moments Diversion : Moose Peterson's Website

So there I am, up the ladder working the F7F Tigercat having one helluva a good time. My mind was on one thing, that Tigercat so the blinders were on. I noticed a glow in the nose of the Tigercat all of a sudden so I turned around to see a really, little cloud off in the horizon turning pink. I then noticed the P-51 “Precious Medal” and the sodium vapor lights were casting a cool glow in its side that seemed like it could be coming from that small cloud. So I quickly moved the ladder and tripod and went over to it. The sky is really nothing special, the background pretty busy but when’s the next time I’m going to have this plane all to myself at sunrise again (and since they are repainting it, it’s kinda history). There is one thing I’ve learned in aviation photography, there is money to be made recording history. So, I wanna make the shot. But…..

This is very much a backlit situation. Besides that, what’s the main reflector in this silver body? The black tarmac. So I have a double whammy when it come to lighting. Now the only way to make something of that limited color is to underexpose. Doing so takes everything in the photo to the basement. That’s not a good thing. As you can see here, when I did that, there is NO information left in the photo. This is a -4.5 image and it’s simply not working.

OK, let’s just go -.5 and that’s really zero improvement. But one can see instantly the range of light is greater then five stops but that’s not what my eyes are seeing. Many have emailed asking why don’t I introduce flash? That is a very valid approach and it can make gorgeous things happen. But bringing in a dozen flash and all that comes along with that takes time and simply put, no one is paying me to spend that kind of time. Besides, it’s just not what I do, I work with what I have available. So coming back to what dragged my ladder over here in the first place, the sodium vapor light reflection in the fuselage, HDR was the only solution (using flash would have blown away that glow). You’re probably going back up to the finished image, looking at the other two and wondering how those two images made the top on and how the top one doesn’t look like HDR. Precious Medal is a silver bodied, lime green winged plane.

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