Colour temperature

Whether light reads warm or cool, measured in kelvin. The unspoken weather of a scene.

Colour temperature is light's emotional register measured in kelvin: candle and tungsten at the warm low end, noon daylight in the middle, overcast and shadow blue above. The eye adapts and forgets; the camera records the weather of the light exactly as it stands.

The unspoken weather is a storyteller's instrument because the associations are bodily: warmth as shelter and memory, coolness as distance, morning and machine. Mixed temperatures inside one frame, a warm lamp in a blue dusk, is among the oldest reliable images there is; our own palette, gold event against ink cold, is that image made permanent.