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Bio

Dan's mugshotDaniel H. Bennett was born in London in 1965 and lived in England until moving to the United States in 2000, settling in Northern Colorado.

His interest in vision and observation of the behavior of light has been life-long. On a trip to France as a young man his hosts called him “Monsieur Tête-en-l’air” (Mr. Head-in-the-air) due to his always watching for halos, rainbows, sun-dogs (parhelia), etc. He was particularly influenced by a book written in 1939 (published in English in 1954, Dover) by Professor M. Minnaert, called The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air. A Field Guide to Time-Varying Light Sources was conceived as a modern successor to that book, and adopts a similar approach, while revealing the secrets of modern light sources.

Daniel is married with four children, a motorcycle and two accordions.

Buy the book!

The Field Guide is available from Amazon and other outlets.

The book's front cover

ISBN-13: 978-069-236090-3

ISBN-10: 0-692-36090-5

LCCN: 2015900348

Purchase the book on Amazon!

The Blog

Here's my blog, where I'll write articles of interest, things I've learned, tutorials, suggestions for lights to go look at, musings, etc.

Saturday, 12 December 2015 17:59

A city from the air

Written by

In case you weren't already convinced that most street lights are time-varying, here's proof. This is a shot I took of a small US city (I don't know which) from an airplane at night. I swept the camera while taking the shot, using a 1/10 second exposure time. As you can see, there are many lights and groups of lights which show strong periodic traces. Most of these lights are pressurized sodium street lights, which flash at 120 times per second (in the US).

I had to adjust the exposure and tone curve in Lightroom to compensate for the fact that a city at night isn't very bright as far as a camera's concerned; and when you sweep the camera, it's even dimmer.

Swept image of a city from the air

Last modified on Saturday, 12 December 2015 18:05

Site design

This site is powered by Joomla! CMS. The template is "Cast" from Joomlage, modified here and there. The gallery is powered by RokGallery. All design by Dan Bennett.

Copyright

All content on this website, including images, videos, text and material from "A Field Guide To Time-Varying Light Sources" is © 2023 Daniel H. Bennett / timevaryinglights.com / A Bear Peering Round A Rock, and may not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved to the extent of applicable law. Exceptions: third-party images, which are credited as applicable, third-party embedded videos and public domain images.