black_and_white

I’m sure we are all well aware that we shouldn’t stare into the sun. The risk of permanent vision damage is surprisingly high. It’s particularly bad if you are looking through a magnifying device such as a telescope or binoculars……or a camera.

My eyes are sensitive at the best of times, so on the beach when it’s sunny I always try and remember to wear sunglasses. If I don’t, my eyes are streaming in seconds. This makes it difficult when I’m trying to take a picture like the one above (click on it to make it bigger). I have to try and shield my eyes while at the same time holding the camera steady and then pressing the button. It generally takes a few goes to get the shot I want because of this. The picture above is close to what I was hoping for. The horizon isn’t quite flat, but it captures the sun reflecting off the sea as I hoped: almost all of the colour has gone to just leave a silvery white and black. Every setting was turned down about as low as it would go to make the picture possible at all. The sun is only just out of shot, directly above the left side of the image. There were no clouds at all and it was about 2PM yesterday when I took it.

There was once a scientist named Joseph Plateau who stared into the sun for too long. This text copied from wikipedia:

“Fascinated by the persistence of luminous impressions on the retina, he performed an experiment in which he gazed directly into the sun for 25 seconds. Consequently, he lost his eyesight later in his life”

I wonder how they know that it was this experiment caused his blindness? A smart chap, he invented the phenakistiscope, which was one of the first devices to give the illusion of moving images, and was an early precursor of cinema.

Cheers, Tom.