RE: Mike on One Show
Old news now, but as iPlayer links expire I have been meaning to share with you all the YouTube one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h09pxfxM-5cI remember visiting Mike's a few years ago with a number of other collectors and being awestruck by his collection and the way he has displayed it. There was stuff in his loft that I hadn't seen since I was a small kid.
On a side note (this is sadly off-topic, but bear with me), I have to agree with the artist Chris Cyprus featured in the report. The juxtaposition of sodium street lighting against a blue dusk sky (or blue dawn sky if you're up early enough) really is a thing of beauty. Many of my non-photography friends think I'm daft when I suggest dawn or dusk is the best time of day to photograph a street scene with impact. I won't fill this thread up with off-topic pictures, but I will share a few to illustrate where the artist is coming from.
Thornwood in Colchester is lit with 35W SOX Phosco P107s. Here is a photograph of the road in daylight taken in December 2017.
A few hours later the same scene looked like this. Photograph taken in December 2017.
The reason why SOX lighting and a dusk sky appear to look good together may be explained by
the colour wheel, where colours diagonally opposite each other are considered as complementary.A second example of SOX against a blue dusk sky. These are old-style Philips MA90s (with the streamline shoe) in Mason Road, Colchester photographed in December 2017.
As the colour temperatures of SOX and SON are close together, SON lighting also complements a dusk blue sky...
These SON-running Thorn Gamma Sevens light the access road into Colchester General Hospital. Photograph taken in December 2017.
Even MBF gets in on the act. Blue and green are considered to create an analogous harmony on the colour wheel, and this makes the combination of mercury lighting and a dark blue sky also pleasing to the eye...
One of two Phosco P177s that I know of in St. Osyth, near Clacton-on-Sea, which escaped being replaced with SOX in the 1980s. Photograph taken in October 2017.
Or perhaps these colour combinations look pleasing to our eyes because we are just glad to see them. You'll notice that the centre of the colour wheel - which cannot be readily paired with anything - is pure white ...or LED as we know it!
I do feel for the artist Chris Cyprus featured on the One Show. He has the much more difficult job of painting these scenes when even a street lighting enthusiast with a camera would be seriously pushed for time under such circumstances. The blue sky of dusk always fades to black within 15 to 20 minutes.