Thank you Tim, and to everyone for your kindness!
I always try to select a background shade that is meant to provide an overall ambience for each individual composition. Light, both natural and artificial, although sometimes to a slightly lesser extent in the latter, reflects off every surface in any environment. It follows therefore that every colour, at all times and in every scenario will be influenced far more profoundly than we are normally aware of!
Herein lies a subject that I find utterly fascinating:
The human brain is an extraordinary organ. Amongst it's many other talents, it has, for most of us anyway, the ability to "filter" the colour effect to some degree. Strangely though, it is not quite as clever as we might assume, and is in fact rather too easily fooled! We had all spent our child and early adulthood busily honing the instrument and gaining what we are now perfectly content to accept is a reasonably full understanding of the environment around us. Indeed, we can even at times become quite upset if that established sense of "order" is challenged by anything or anyone.
I fear the issue of railway liveries will inevitably rumble on, and on for ever and again?!
What I mean by this can be quite simply demonstrated: Take a clean white sheet of paper and hold it up front of you. Well? It is obvious, it is white isn't it! Now move to another part of the room, or better still, if you are not afraid of being observed and considered to be suffering some form of aberration, take it outside. Observe carefully, and what started out perhaps slightly greyish, yellowish, or greenish might change to blueish, or whatever!
However, by far my own favourite example of this principle in extremis is the infamous case of the "Pink Spitfire":
Whenever I have recounted this tale I have met with some incredulity, the odd sideways look and even a pat on the head with the statement: "Never mind old boy, keep taking the tablets..."!
"But it's true" I doth vainly protest.
Several years ago, many members of the aeroplane enthusiast community were aghast when the wealthy, (he had to be) and apparently ill advised owner of a 1944 vintage Photo-Reconnaissance Spitfire, had it painted in an outrageous all over rose-pink! The aviation press went mad, but he, aided by a few others defended his decision by producing genuine, irrefutable evidence:!
"Ah well, yes", said the "experts" back then, and still do whenever the issue is raised; "That camouflage scheme was for flying missions at sunrise or sunset".
It might seem perfectly logical, but hold on, I'm not so sure. Do they know anything at all about old fashioned, black and white photography, let alone the special requirements of vital military intelligence gathering? I don't know much about it myself but:... The sideways and downward pointing cameras in the Spitfire were rigidly fixed in the fuselage, aft of the cockpit, so while the pilot was concentrating on getting himself into a precise position and attitude, all the while risking his life facing the threat of the enemy's full fury, he would not, nor could he be expected to fiddle about with f stops or apertures? Find it, fly over it, press the doodah, go round, do it again at a different angle or just to make sure, then get the ****** hell out of there...?
Guaranteed exposure success at sunrise? Enough light for full and crisp shot when there might be long shadows that could end up hiding a critical bit of evidence? High noon then? Not enough shadow for 3D clarity, and some risk of over exposure. Back to sunset again; and the same former conditions apply. No, no, no! Look at most published aerial photos' and they have almost certainly been taken at an ideal mid morning or mid afternoon! Doubtless, the enemy would have known that too, so may well have been on higher alert!
For me at least, the jury remained out until one slightly overcast, summer day.
Duxford aerodrome and museum is "just down the road" for me, so I decided to pop in. Imagine my delight upon entry, to observe - I could hardly miss it - the said pink Spitfire, sitting pretty on the "Apron", it's cowlings off and attended by fitters and engineers. Camouflaged on the tarmac, surrounded by the lush greenery of the field and tree lined boundary beyond? Hardly!
The airfield is large, so by the time I had reached the 'plane for a closer look, the engine had been recovered and was being run up. I stayed for a while. Shortly, the pilot taxied out, paused for clearance, then applied full power, and with a great roar from the mighty Merlin, the beastie sped down the runway and gracefully lifted into the air, turned in a wide arc and performed a fly-by before departing westward...
My jaw might have been heard to hit the deck?
Remember that I mentioned the overcast? It was a very high, grey, unbroken one, but still surprisingly bright, enough indeed to induce a slight squint after a while. Now you might be forgiven for thinking that it really is impossible to hide a big noisy lump of metal hurtling through the sky? Well, at the very moment that Spitty cleared the horizon, it almost completely disappeared!
True, the odd reflection and shadow was perfectly obvious, but it was the outline that had vanished against the cloud. I realised at that moment that if I had been a determined and even experienced German gunner in charge of a nest of very nasty ordinance, I would have had terrible difficulty working out precisely the speed, distance, direction and altitude of my target! Any hope of getting an accurate deflection shot in was frankly zero?!
Ahah! So there! Summer overcast! Clear blue sunny sky: High speed and altitude flight possible, PR Blue airframe, perfect. Typical summer: Grey and cloudy - but the show must go on, so provided the cover is reasonably high and it is still bright enough; very, very risky low altitude flying necessary. Any means of confusing the enemy, if only briefly is absolutely vital!
But pink for goodness sake, how on earth?
Some very clever "boffins" had worked it out way back in 1939!
Temperate zone: Fairly verdant in summertime, in other words; lots of green everywhere. Frequently hazy or cloudy though. Meanwhile up above, light heading earthwards from the sun meets the cloud layer; and some of it is reflected away. If the cover is thin; quite a lot of it passes right through and reaches us and all that lovely green stuff. Some of course gets absorbed - that is after all the business of all those plants - but still quite a lot gets reflected back up again. Water droplets in the cloud act like mirrors, reflecting the green back down again - and so on!
Now consider the rainbow effect: colour does not exist in one. nor anything else for that matter. It is merely a human and some other animals' response to a specific pattern of reflected radio wavelengths. Those wavelengths can be described as circular, so starting at infra red, will pass through yellow, green, blue, ultra violet and back to red again. Every shade of colour therefore has an exact opposite on the "wheel".
We all know that if we stare at a brightly coloured object for a short while, a residual image of it will remain for a few seconds on our retinas, but oddly will be a different colour! Curiously, the same thing happens with the old chemical photography. The wheel comes back into play. Black is white, red is green, and yellow is blue, and vice versa on a any negative.
We all know by a lifetimes worth of experience that a cloudy sky is grey. But what we actually see in our eyes is all that reflected pale green. But the brain says "Oh no, don't be stupid, of course it isn't green!"
Stare for a while - just like that German gunner, anxiously scanning the sky for a target, and we get a residual effect on the retina. The opposite of pale green is...? Yep, you guessed it; PINK !! Brain says again "What the heck? You really must be stupid, there's no way that the sky is pink!"
If somebody shoves something that actually does appear to be genuinely pink in the "grey" sky, the gunner, and indeed all the rest of us, will not be able to tell the difference, however hard we try!
Trouble is, buffoons find boffins a bit troubling! The silly old duffers at the Air Ministry could only manage to accept the first half of the theory; which is why the initial RAF camouflage colour adopted for aircraft undersides not long after commencement of hostilities was a pale green shade; otherwise known as "Sky"! When they considered that their half hadn't worked as well as hoped for, after all, too many were still being shot down, buffoons then declared, "We told you it wouldn't work!" and plumped for plain light grey. The boys still got shot down though.
"I say, come on chaps, pink is a bit too, er, well, you know, going too far really!"
Pete.
