Dennis Hollingsworth

The trouble with Cad Red

Cadmium red is beautiful, but the wavelength is short and the tonality is dark. It needs light to ignite it. I should relax with this limitation, that making it work in low light is difficult. So why try? I'm a little hard headed sometimes.

But I do like it flooded with light, a high raking light.

I like red lights. Once in LA, I was stargazing one night in the backyard, and I replace most lights inthe house with red bulbs. It freaked Stephanie out when she got home.

Red lights take me back to the years in the Navy. I worked in the Combat Information Center, the dark room behind the bridge that contained all the electronic sensors.

http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinfo/navyjobs/navyjobs2/blos.htm

Lights around us tended to be red to keep our eyes adjusted. At night, the ship would be, light tight, traveling incognito. You would have to go through light lockers before you got topside, flat black vestibules with baffles so light within wouldn't escape. The world in low light is amazing. You see with rods, not the cones. It's like peripheral vision, there must be a cognitive difference to it.

Radar guys, scope dope. It was the brain of the ship. A philosophical model of man, moving blind into the night... reconstructing the world plot for plot. Where are we? Who's around me? Who is friend, who is foe?

http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/8035/