Strathclyde Park – the place of lighting upgrades

Last time, I found they were installing solar lighting along the edges of paths in Strathclyde Park.

This time, an evening visit revealed some snazzy new LED (possibly solar-powered too) lighting units installed in the car park area.

It took a moment for these to register, then I realised I was looking at something new.

Very substantial columns holding an interesting circular array of LED light sources, and quite different from the more usual plain rectangular panels of LEDs used for most outdoor lighting installations, and street lights.

While it was already too dark for me to make out any of the details on these units, the one obvious feature was angled arrays of solar panels on top of the lighting head.

It’s nice to see someone actually THINK about their design, and how the LEDs are angled to light the surrounding area. So many installations appear to be designed by people who don’t have a clue, and mount the light sources pointing straight down, or straight out from the side, as if it was only possible to fit the sources only vertically or horizontally.

My neighbours suffer from the same ‘blindness’, and have mounted floodlights supposedly t light their back garden, but have just mounted them flat against the house wall – so they just shine straight into my rooms! Would it really tax their brains so much just to angle the fittings down, to shine INTO their garden rather than OVER?

Although I zoomed into the circular head unit with its ring of lights only a few seconds later, the resulting shot was a completely different thanks to the evening light.

There’s no detail, and the colour went crazy.

I couldn’t correct it using any processing filters, and any manual attempts caused the white light sources to change to whatever colour of correction or rebalancing I applied.

Looking at the histogram showed three distinct, narrow, red, green, and blue peaks, with almost no overlap or distribution

Changing the RGB levels didn’t do anything useful. The white lights became coloured lights, but I could not, for example, make the white central column look white, or make the sky look as it does in the pic above.

What I did find was that adjusting the contrast and gamma DID change the overall colour balance of the image, which was very odd.

Unfortunately, making these changes did not have the desired result, which was to improve the visibility of the name seen on the ring. That barely changed.

I took more than one of these shots – all showed the same effect, so it wasn’t simply one bad shot. Something was upsetting the metering and capture.

The name shown is ‘AUTONOMOUS’, with a graphic or logo to its right.

At the time of this post, I couldn’t track down any info on this item.

Clearly, I’ll have to try to remember to repeat that last shot during a daytime visit to the park, when there’s some ‘normal’ light bouncing around the place. Or maybe try flash?

It’s just weird how the large view came out as expected given the evening low light, but the close-up just went nuts under the same light.

Strathclyde Park’s solar path lights… Umm, NOPE!

This is actually a wider observation at this time of year, but the park’s the only one I get to easily.

I was able to see the lights being installed, in the best of weather.

Now, it’s autumn heading into winter, the weather’s not quite so nice, it’s wet (very, at the moment), and the leaves have rapidly departed from their trees.

Those leaves are now accumulating on the paths, mainly on the edges, and turning into rotting slime – that means the poor old solar lights aren’t getting much of charge during the day, and, even if they were, if they’re near deciduous trees, they’re probably can’t even be seen below that slimy covering.

No real problem, it will eventually all clear naturally as the leaves rot, then get washed away by our lovely Scottish rain, and then the lights will be back.

But for the moment, I won’t even suggest you try to find any in this pic.

In fact, other than the main path, even finding the side paths is a challenge at the moment.

Oops… Playing in the evening lights in Strathclyde Park again

Couldn’t resist firing off some ‘Just for fun’ shots as I found myself in Strathclyde Park shortly after the ‘new’ solar path lighting decided it was time to come on.

This was earlier than usual for me, as it’s generally been later and darker when I’ve been there before.

No sort of planning or prep, these were just fired off to catch the view in each direction as I stood on the path.

The second one is intriguing, being one of those irritating shots I find myself with, which insists on LOOKING as if it is NOT level despite proving itself to be level if things like the sides of buildings, or known vertical objects are checked.

In this case, I had to rotate it at least 1.5° clockwise, or it looked as if it was all leaning to one side (to me, at least).

More resurrection fails

Not that I expected anything better, but I was carrying the old resurrection camera, having intended to take some comparison shots, but was beaten by time and the light. Sadly, I KNOW it doesn’t work in the dark.

Two issues hit immediately:

• I seem to have forgotten how to make it work at 400 ASA (its max), and it tops out at 200 ASA for some reason. The above slipped up to 3200 ASA.
• It does not have ANY for of anti-shake, which was introduced on the following model, and was the one thing every reviewer wished it had, as it was so good (in its day) otherwise.

I had three tries, but it wanted a 2-second exposure, so shaky results were inevitable (remember, I’m doing handheld, no tripod stuffed in back pocket, and no handy supports where I was standing).

There wasn’t really any point in processing these, although I did apply the same colour correction as used for the images above, although I don’t think the effect was noticeable.

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What can I say?

This is the face of progress.

I’m not even going to mention the tricks that the big smartphone manufacturers are doing now, meaning any idiot can take decent pics under almost any conditions now.

At least the techniques they’re using degrade the pics, so they don’t usually get great detail, or can take control of the shot and zoom in for high resolution crops.

But, that’s probably only a matter of time.