Self-Portrait Tuesday: screwed by physics

The science bit: the human eye is most sensitive to visible light in the green part of the EM spectrum. This isn't true of all animals, some are more sensitive to blue, some even see in the infrared. Deep in the ocean, where only high energy blue light can penetrate, fish have evolved to see only that colour. My favourite deep sea fish, the stoplight loosejaw, very cleverly produces red light via bioluminescence, meaning it can basically illuminate other fish with an invisible searchlight, handy for hunting. The other fish have no idea. It has also evolved a very nifty way of indirectly 'seeing' the red light bouncing back off its prey, using a derivative of chlorophyll, because of course it naturally has similar blue-sensing eyes to the other fish in that environment. But for us humans, we see mostly green.

I guess camera sensors are built with a spectral response similar to the human eye, because I could not for the life of me get mine to pick up the red and blue parts of my face without blowing out the bloody green channel. And these lights are absolutely infuriating to try to arrange, so there was much cursing every time I moved and they fell off my head. And that was after driving around for a couple of hours trying to find the stupid lights. "Do a self-portrait with fairy lights over your face", Colin said, "it'll be awesome", he said. Thanks a lot buddy, you owe me a drink :)