Years ago, back when I spent a lot of time taking pictures of sunrises and sunsets, I experienced a phenomenon that I had no explanation for at the time, but later learned in nursing school what it was.
I used to get up at ridiculous-o-clock to photograph sunrises. One calm, summer morning I had my camera poised on a tripod, and I was looking at the light barely starting to glow in the Eastern sky. I tested my camera with a long-exposure, and the camera picked up a dynamic, colorful sunrise going on. The clouds had a beautiful and rich pink sunrise in the image, and my eye could not pick up any colour at all.
The image below was the first frame that I took last night. My eye could not see the colour. I could only see a dark, colourless sky. My camera, obviously, did the heavy-lifting showing the beautiful greens, pinks, and purples in the sky in front of me.
After this night, I read a number of people's complaints about why cameras, even cell-phone cameras are picking up colours more saturated than how we are seeing them with our eyes.
Enter nursing school. It comes down to the rods and cones in our eyes. At night, or when the light is low, we see in gray-scale. Rods don't need as much light for us to see, but cones, responsible for seeing colour need a lot more light to do their job.
On nights like last night where our cameras seemed to be the heroes compared to what we were seeing with our eyes, it might have to do with the lower levels of light, rendering our colour perception limited. So the cameras are the truth-tellers, our eyes are not.
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