The purple of failing street lights.

[Paul Taylor]

I watch a photographer on YouTube (Willem Verbeeck) and he has made a few videos about trying to find and photograph failing LED streetlights in LA. I live in Phoenix and they are pretty common here as I think the weather leads to them failing. Apparently the coating on them fails and causes them to go intensely purple.

On my way to work I finally seen one that might make an interesting photoscene so I took some pictures with my favorite 35mm (Contax RX) and just some Kodak Gold 200. I noticed in Willem's videos the difference in amount of purple in reality and film was drastic - and he usually shoots Portra. I was curious to see if using a different stock would do anything (it didn't.) I might try some Infrared B&W just to see what that looks like since apparently some of the light spectrum is out of range of color emulsion film.

Anyways here are a couple cell phone shots that are quite close to how intensely purple the light is via eyeball :

It is interesting how it has a black-light effect on the lettering on the Contax.


And here it is on film :

This was mixed between the purple light and a normal "warm" street light :

 

[Gary Ayala]

Interesting. So what can you do with purple light?

 

[Stevenson Gawen]

That kind of light (many intentionally blue LED lights i.e. party and stage lighting) is a well known problem and almost a test case in certain image processing circles... On digital it basically drives the blue pixels into hard saturation, then depending on the colour space in use you get various artifacts in colour reproduction.

I've forgotten the details but it's quite interesting

Nice photos by the way!

 

[Bill Brown]

I saw a photographer posting portrait sessions shot under these failing street lights. I see them around the DFW region also.