Assignment:
For most of my life, the color in my photography was primarily determined by a couple of high school musicians who were buddies in 1917. In that year the duo watched a war movie that was advertised as being ‘in color’, they agreed that the color was terrible and proceeded to experiment with color throughout their college years. Long story short, the pair, being helped by a friend who knew someone in the photo business, ended up in Rochester New York. And after years of hard work and generous accommodation of their now employer, the new color film called Kodachrome was introduced. And the world could finally be captured in living color! Fun fact, both of them, had the first name of Leopold! For the record they were Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes,.
Kodachrome was my first exposure (ha!), to photography. However, this film was a bad one to learn photography with, it’s dynamic range was like, all of 5 stops and it was merciless to anyone who overexposed it, resulting in completely washed out colors and very little definition. Thankfully, none of my early attempts of photography with Kodachrome survived my childhood. After many years of black and white photography, I did finally corral Kodachrome’s charms.
Why all this talk about Kodachrome when the assignment is about the ‘Golden Hour’? Well one cannot talk about anything ‘golden’ without understanding what the limitations that we had during the film era, and how that led to the dramatic colors of the ‘Golden Hour’. The human eye has a wonderful ability to adapt to different environmental lighting conditions. If you went outside at noon and watered your blooming roses in the bright springtime sun, and then came back inside to eat lunch, you would not notice that you have moved from a ‘blue’ light outside, to a ‘warm yellow’ light inside. In a sense, your eyes have, what we now call ‘auto white balance’. But Film does not have ‘auto white’ balance’, it’s color response is baked in at the time of manufacture. So for most of the history of color film, we have had just two primary types: a ‘daylight’ film to be used outside, and an ‘tungsten’ film to be used indoors. (Hollywood being Hollywood, had film manufactures make films with many different color responses for their movie sets, so we will ignore those for now). In daylight film, the color response is adjusted so that the ‘blue sky’ won’t overpower the scene and make it appear blue. Conversely, the ‘tungsten’ film is adjusted so that the warm indoor light in most homes will not appear yellow, but will look ‘normal’.
So the golden hour. When the sun is low in the sky, either at sunrise or sunset, the light is ‘warmer’ or ‘yellow’, because as your high school physics book explained, the low sunlight has to pass through more air and thus more of the ‘cooler’ colors like blue get filtered out. And that is why if you took a sunset picture with a film camera, the colors would be wonderful and golden, because the film in the camera was most likely daylight balanced film.
And luck was with me for this assignment, because I actually had a day this week that was not cloudy at sunset and I was able to get a shot. I hope a crystal hummingbird qualifies as an ‘unconventional’ object. And no, I did not use Kodachrome film, since it was discontinued long ago. But I channeled ‘Kodachrome’ with my digital camera, so I’m golden:
