David Krooshof

Green lit remotely guarded site in the snow

Green-lit remotely guarded site, in the snow

After the first snow fall I went out into the forest to make some photos. I noticed a green light shining onto the snow. I went to check what it was, while taking pictures, closing in on it. The pictures I took got progressively more abstract the closer I got to this light.

It turned out to be coming from an abanoned school building at the edge of the town. Nowadays, desolated places and building sites are remotely guarded with green light. This always looks spooky, but especially this night, when it was lightly snowing and the sky turned an odd dusty rose.

  • This is a strange photo with a strange mood. For starters, the sky is dusty rose. The forest floor has a thin layer of snow and is lit with a saturated green flood light. Through the middle of the photo, there is a fence running from side to side. It’s a hard to climb fence with vertical slabs, and sharp triangles on top. Behind it is a single layer building. There aren’t many details visible. At the building, a bright green light is shining through the fence. The shades of the fence cause a pattern of stripes of green and black on the snowy forest floor. We can’t see the light directly, because a big horizontal lightly curved branch, coming into the frame from behind us, is blocking it. The forest floor is curved, and this caused the shade of the top of the fence tot curve too. It seems to follow the curve of the branch. This gives the photo a perceived depth that we know does not belong, but works anyway. A second branch more to the right in the back, does the same thing with a different part of the fence. I placed this photo on top, because I like it the best.
  • This phot is what I was drawn to explore initially. The fence is still deep in the background. Again, the green floodlight is hidden behind a tree branch. The trees aren’t big, about 4 meter high currant trees. They make bundles of stems that fan out. On the forest floor we see the shades of the green light fan out. The sky, seen through the complex mesh of stems, is a bright dusty rose. This causes the shades to be that color too. The snow reflects a lot of that light. So basically, there are three main tones in the image: Black stems fanning out to the top of the images, and alternating stripes of bright green and dusty rose fanning out towards the bottom of the frame.
  • Seen from the other side, with the green light to the back-right of us, we see these alternating green & rose stripes on the snowy forest floor. They diverge, but our perspective converges them to some extent, making them seemingly parallel. They show the slight curve of the ground. The 8 currant trees in the foreground all lean to the right. The green light hits the stems and the snow on them, making them very green and contrasty. We can see tens of meters into the forest, thanks to the snow on the floor. In the background we see a mesh of branches, accented by the snow, but in dusty rose. Between the fine branches, we see this oddly coloured sky.
  • A simpeler, standing photo. The top third is dark, but not devoid of details. To the right, dense currant trees. To the left, we can just make out a bit of the former school building, just two windows and a bit of the wall above them. More importantly, is a green lit straight up tree trunk. On the brightly green lit snowy forest floor, a wide shade zigzags form the back towards us, in the shape of the letter Sigma, more or less. Again, this shade is this dusty rose color.
  • A detail of the tree branches. The sky behind it is a mixture of green and rose washes, a textured blur, a bit like northern lights. Branches enter the frame from the top and top right. The smaller parts hold bits of half molten snow, that glisten in the bright green light. The bottom of the background has pattern to it. This was caused by the top of the fence. I could not figure out why this became a part of the image, because it was outside the frame.
  • I said the top photo was the best, but I work the hardest on this one. Again a standing photo. It shows the fence coming into the frame on the right, exiting into the dark distance near the left edge. The green lamp is hidden behind poles of the fence. On green lit snowy floor, we see a diverging pattern of black shades. The top half of the image is the dusty rose sky, cut by thick black branches from the top left, that are brighter green the smaller they get. More or less in the middle is a lamp post. Its lamp is like a flying saucer, between the branches. It’s out of order, but its glass is lit by the green flood light. This makes the glass into a green object in the dusty rose sky. It may sound like simple photo, but the lines in the green bottom half and the naturel items + green UFO in the top half against the dusty rose sky make it quite strange.

These photos are phone snaps. I did not change the color.

It started snowing lightly again. To my eyes, the sky really turned into this color. I can see it in the images I took without this green light too. Maybe it was not as intense in reality, as the camera tried to work out a white balance.

But while I kept photographing, the white balance in my eyes shifted similarly to that of the camera. The green light can't change. It's just one wavelength. White balance therefore does not change it in color, only intensity. What I saw in the screen of my phone there and then, was really close to what I saw with my eyes in that very moment. These images are true to my perception, and I did not change the colors in post for that reason. I was amazed that the shadows took the same color as the sky, and that the camera registerd that too.

It seems these lights are green because they work well for the cameras of the guards that watch these lacations remotely. My photo session was likely being monitored by a guard. I must have triggered their motion detection. These lights are said to not bother the animals too much, but it drew me in like a moth.

After it stopped snowing, the rose tone in the sky disappeared. The shorter wavelengths weren’t scattered as much anymore. So the sky turned grey, with a yellow tone from some of the sox streetlights.

Me, taking the pictures.

After it stopped snowing, the dusty rose tone in the sky disappeared. The shorter wavelengths weren’t scattered as much anymore. So the sky turned it's usual grey, with a yellow tone from the sox streetlights.