Today’s picture contains, as I’m sure you noticed, a rainbow. I was actually on the hunt for some good pictures of wild mustard and noticed (it was hard not to) clouds moving in. Clouds mean rain and rain means, in the right conditions, rainbows. Could I manage to find a rainbow in the midst of bright yellow mustard? If I could, it’d make a sweet shot. All you need for a rainbow is the sun, shining at the right angle, and raindrops. Both were present and all I needed to do was get to the right place at the right time. Circumstances worked out in my favor and I reached the field you see just as a couple of excellent rainbows started to do their thing.
Now, aside from being an attractive shot, this pic also gives us a nice physical demonstration of the fact that white light, when passed through a prism (as effectively happens in rainbows) is broken up into its constituent colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Very pretty indeed. But here’s a question. Where’s brown in that spectrum? Or pink? The answer is – nowhere. Just as the human ear can be fooled by combinations of tones into hearing a tone that isn’t really there, so can the human eye be "fooled" into seeing a color that doesn’t show up within the light spectrum. Like brown. Or tan. You get the idea.
What’s interesting is that individual light components don’t interact in such a way as to produce the frequency of "brown" (there’s no such thing) but that the eye, upon seeing a particular combination of what I"ll call "lower level colors," interprets them as a completely new color.
Just another example of how our eyes move in mysterious ways.
- And that’s today’s word from the bird
Brown isn't a color?
Really?
It shows up in my Paint Shop Pro materials palette, and it's in my pencil box and my ink collection. If it isn't a color, could you explain more about what I am seeing?
.-= Juliet A´s last blog ..Hummingbird =-.
Hi Juliet – Interesting, isn't it? Brown isn't a "basic" color, i.e. one of those in the visible light spectrum. All of those are the ones in a rainbow – the classic red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. All the others are "higher-order" colors. A good, but not perfect, analogy is with sound. A basic frequency, corresponding perhaps to A, is a somewhat annoying and artificial tone. But when a violin plays an A it sounds great. That's because the violin is generating the annoying tone and a whole bunch of other tones, all of which, when interpreted in our skulls, makes the "violin sound."
Much the same with color. A judicious mix of basic colors will be interpreted by our brains as a different color. Take your brown, for instance. If you mix together 117 parts red, 76 parts green, and 30 parts blue, what you'll end up with is a rich brown. As long as the individual specks of red, green and blue are small enough, you'll be unable to see them individually but will instead see a continuous brown.
Pretty neat, eh?
Wow. Okay, thank you.
.-= Juliet A´s last blog ..Sketchfest continues! =-.