Below you will find a meandering story about the colour of light, the colour of light in Mexico and illustrated, strangely by portraits in b+w (that I have added colour) of  a lovely Mexican girl who was a bleach blonde but had green eyes. The film was Kodak B+W Infrared film which is sensitive to part of the spectrum that we humans cannot see.

Few know that sunlight has color. The colour of sunlight varies with latitude. Light in Whistler BC (on a sunny day) renders snow with a blue cast. Bright colours at lower latitudes seem brighter. Why?

As soon as Eastman Kodak was about to market its new Kodachrome transparency film in 1935 they seconded one of their handsome (and white) executives to pose at noon in Washington DC while wearing a white shirt. For the purposes of securing an accuracy of colour the shirt had to be seen as an absolute white while the man’s skin was to look healthy. They finally narrowed down the calibration and Kodachrome was launched.

Why was Washington DC chosen and why at noon? Obvious to most, we do know that sunrises and sunsets get rosy and red. At noon light is devoid of colour (this is relative to latitude). Because the US was becoming a world power and its centre was DC the latitude for it became a norm.

Now if you were to have a roll of pristine 1935 Kodachrome and you were to expose it to a white executive wearing a white shirt at noon on a sunny day in Whistler, DC and Florida you would have a bluish shirt in the Whistler shot, an accurate DC shot (except on a smoggy day) and your Florida shot would show you a warmish white shirt.

Another factor in the colour of light is how we humans see ultra violet light.

In the colour spectrum ranging from infra-red (we cannot see it) to red all the way to blue, purple and indigo there is ultra-violet which we cannot see but some animals, birds and insects can.

An ultra-violet camera filter which ranges from colourless to a soft pink, blocks the access of UV which makes film, video and digital images bluish.

People living at different latitudes see colour in a different way particularly in their choice of colours for their everyday life. You might find lots of red cars (red Ferraris in hot Italy) at the lower latitudes while in Vancouver or Sweden there will be blue cars, green cars and many a silver car.

While teaching English at Palmolive in the early 70s the company had just introduced a refreshing (it had ether!) toothpaste called Ultra-Brite. One day while teaching a class of marketing executives I put some colours on the blackboard with coloured chalk. One the left side I had swaths of black, dark blue, light blue and white. On the right I had orange, red, yellow and a bit of blue. I asked them which colours they preferred. The all signalled the colours on the right. I then surprised them with the fact that the colours they had not chosen were the colours of Ultra-Brite while the ones they had liked were that of the competitor, Crest.

I will make the blanket statement here that Ultra-Brite may have failed when it was revealed that it had ether but I would assert here that Mexicans were not “sophisticated” enough to accept the “sober” colours on the end of the colour spectrum.

I will not go into further details on colour temperature as I wrote about it in detail here. What is important to note is that in Mexico light is warmer to our eyes and skies even on cloudy days rarely have that frigid cyan/blue of Vancouver.

Some might wonder why it is that I am using these portraits of a Mexican blonde here as they are in b+w. Her name is long gone from my memory. The story behind the pictures is below.