Saturday, March 31, 2007
CITY OF (EXTREMELY POWERFUL) LIGHT
Readers aren’t convinced by the Age’s before-and-after shots of Sydney’s Earth Hour lights-out experiment:
The first shot is ridiculous. Drivers wouldn’t require headlights if Sydney were illuminated so. They’d need sunglasses, and lead shields.
A few nights ago there was an awful accident below the Harbour Bridge in which several people were killed when their boat was struck by a ferry. Whether the struck vessel was displaying navigation lights is a matter of dispute; but if conditions were even close to those depicted in the first image, navigation lights would be redundant. Perhaps the ferry skipper was blinded by our hyper-bright bridge. Light-wise, that first image has been cranked.
Let’s take a look at a few other shots of Sydney at night, without Age light enhancement. There’s this one:
And this:
And one more:
UPDATE. Attention Media Watch: the photographer you need to speak to about relative exposure times and so on is Adam Mclean.
UPDATE II. When de-brightened, the first image looks compellingly realistic.
UPDATE III. Lefty blogger Daily Flute says bollocks to Earth Hour.
UPDATE IV. Another lefty calls bollocks.
UPDATE V. The Fragrant Elf reports Earth Hour drama:
I nearly burnt my hair while lighting the candles and tripped over the rubbish bin ... I also had to cheat for a minute, as when I got back to my flat after checking out the view of the city (a couple minutes walk away) to see the lights go off, there was a large bump and I had to turn on all the lights to check everything was ok.
UPDATE VI. Lack of interest noted outside of central Sydney:
In North Parramatta, all the neon signs were on as usual. Shame ... we went outside and had a look to see if any businesses around were participating, and it didn’t seem as though they were, so it looked like any other night.
UPDATE VII. Mark Steyn:
Being on Eastern Time (US) rather than Eastern Time (Oz), I’m afraid I slept through the excitement of Sydney’s “Earth Hour” when, from the Lord Mayor to the lowliest rummy lying in the gutter belching incandescent meth fumes, the entire city turned out its lights for one whole hour in order to stop global warming. You can see a satellite picture of it here.
No, wait, that’s North Korea by night. Now there’s a guy who’s really doing his bit to save the planet.
UPDATE VIII. Stately Blair mansion shines on through the Earth Hour gloom:
