View Full Version : Color of light and sky through day/night?

08 August 2010, 04:53 PM
Do anybody know any good references for how the color of light and sky changes over the course of a day/night as well as over the course of the seasons?

08 August 2010, 07:13 PM
A bit wide question, since color range kind of inlcludes every possible colors one can see and even couple of more. :D

During the day the color temperature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature) of sunlight usually changes somewhere between 2000 and 8000 (or even 10000) Kelvin, but it always has all the colors (difference in painting to the light which does not - for example highway natrium bulbs).

Where is also an important question, since the variety seasons and of Sun height chances a lot depending where you are. Also amount of haze affects a lot to how the light is experienced. Clear days of winter are here in Finland a bit different thant they are somewhere with heat and moist.

Having complete sky references for all seasons, all times and all the places is kind of a huge reference library, but how about taking those references with own camera? You can get one days references quite quicly - even if the weather is not good at the first day...

Hope this helps even a bit. Maybe someone already has complete library or some wise advice.

08 August 2010, 08:21 PM
Fair enough.

I used to have the weblink to a site, where a guy was posting his timelapse shots taken every hour of every day. I think he lived in Montana, USA. Still, that was a remarkable reference library. I wonder if there are other such libraries out there. Having such the web a fair bit, I still haven't found what I am looking for.

I need this to support the development of light/shadow/colours over the course of a day for a short film, I am working on.

08 August 2010, 07:40 AM
My apologies for sounding like smartass. It somehow just happens sometimes. :D

Probably I didn't find the guy you mentioned, but couple of sky timalapse videos:

Tokyo one year in 15 mins: here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en-GB&v=Lb8MUeZrxbc)

WIP: San Francisco sky last 128 days: here (http://murphlab.com/hsky/)


If a day's routine is enough to get started, I'd still suggest that you could take your own references. It is done quite easily with almost any digital camera (if its not just complitely gray for next 100 days or something). You know what you need for your project so you can also focus getting those qualities and also remember how it really was then.

Photographs of the sky are often not only how the sky was, but also how photographer/editor wanted it to be (just take a loot to for example googles image search with "sky" or something). Often filtered with color or neutral density filters, polarizing filters and editet to something "dramatic". So after knowing how it goes, it's also question about how do you want it.

09 September 2010, 10:22 AM
A very influential contributor to light and color is cloud coverage.

The clouds will reflect the sunlight, the haze on the horizon will change the color of the sun to red and the sky will give the bluish tint....so during a sunset you will get things like pink light and purple shadows. But the next day, in the same place....everything can look different depending on the clouds.

But in a cloudless day in the desert....you are going to get desaturation and overexposure.

Or on a cloudy day in a garden, there will be no visible light source, but the colors of the plants are incredibly saturated and rich in color.

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09 September 2010, 10:22 AM