Chasing Light and Colour: The Magic of Rare Optical Phenomena

The pursuit of colour leads to unexpected places. What began as an attempt to recreate Oswald's colour circle evolved into a deeper appreciation for the rare and magical moments when nature reveals colours that exist at the very edge of human perception. From the laboratory discovery of Olo to the legendary green flash at sunset, these experiences remind us that the world of colour extends far beyond our everyday experience.

The Laboratory Meets the Beach

The connection between scientific colour discovery and natural observation became strikingly clear during my artworks at Venus Bay. The sea-green illuminated waves I sketched, created by late afternoon sunlight penetrating the surf, bore an uncanny resemblance to the Olo colour described in laboratory conditions, which matches Ostwald's Sea Green. Reminding me that the best artistic subjects often combine practical purpose with natural beauty.

This wasn't mere coincidence. Both phenomena involve precise conditions—specific angles, particular wavelengths, and the right environmental factors. The laboratory uses laser precision to activate cone cells in extraordinary ways, while nature uses the angle of the sun, the clarity of water, and the movement of waves to create equally extraordinary visual experiences.

The Elusive Green Flash

Nature exhibits other amazing colour phenomena such as the mysterious green flash—a brief burst of vivid green light that appears just as the sun disappears below the ocean horizon. At Venus Bay, with its north-south running beach and western ocean view, conditions are theoretically perfect for observing this rare event.

I've witnessed it once: a fleeting moment of intense green above the setting sun, gone almost before the eye could register it. The experience was so brief that I didn't have the opportunity to photograph it, yet the memory remains vivid. This phenomenon has been famously observed in Hawaii and Cornwall, locations that share Venus Bay's advantage of an unobstructed western horizon over open water.

The green flash occurs due to atmospheric refraction—the same physics that creates rainbows and mirages. As the sun sets, Earth's atmosphere acts like a prism, separating sunlight into its component colours. The green wavelength, being shorter than red but longer than blue, becomes visible for a split second as the sun's red light is blocked by the horizon while the blue light scatters into the atmosphere above.

The Science of Rare Colours

These phenomena—whether laboratory-created Olo or naturally occurring green flashes—share common characteristics. They exist at the boundaries of normal perception, require specific conditions to manifest, and challenge our understanding of how colour works.

The Olo discovery reveals that our eyes are capable of perceiving colours we never normally see. The specialised equipment required to create this experience highlights how much of the visible spectrum remains unexplored in terms of human perception.

Similarly, the green flash demonstrates how atmospheric conditions can reveal colours that exist in sunlight but are normally invisible to us. 

The emergence of AI-generated content about the Olo discovery represents another layer of this colour story.

What strikes me most about this entire journey—from filling a Wilcox palette to witnessing the green flash—is how it demonstrates the persistence of wonder in an age of technological explanation. Despite our sophisticated understanding of wavelengths, cone cells, and atmospheric optics, these colour phenomena retain their magic.

The sea-green waves at Venus Bay still take my breath away, regardless of my understanding of light refraction and wavelength. The green flash remains mysterious and beautiful, even when I comprehend the atmospheric physics involved. The Olo discovery fascinates not because it's inexplicable, but because it reveals new possibilities within our existing understanding.

Rob Candy's gift of the Wilcox palette initiated a journey I never anticipated. What seemed like a simple project to match colours became an exploration spanning historical colour theory, contemporary vision science, natural phenomena, and artificial intelligence.

The palette sits by my easel now, filled with pigments that approximate Oswald's 24-color circle. But its real value lies not in the colours themselves, but in the journey they inspired. From mixing stubborn phthalo pigments to capture elusive sea-green, to witnessing laboratory breakthroughs that reveal new dimensions of human vision, to standing on a beach waiting for that fleeting green flash—each experience deepened my understanding of colour's complexity and beauty.

In this age of digital reproduction and artificial intelligence, the rarest colours still require us to show up—whether in the laboratory or on the beach—and witness them with our own eyes. Some things, it seems, cannot be replicated or explained away, only experienced and celebrated.

see also Part 1 The Quest for Sea Green

Part 2 The Discovery of Olo

Part 3 AI, Technology and Traditional Observation

AI, Technology and Traditional Observation

 AI Enters the Conversation

The intersection of art, science, and technology became even more intriguing when I discovered an AI-generated "podcast" discussing the Olo discovery. Created using NotebookLM with Google's Gemini 1.5 model, it featured realistic male and female "hosts" providing a surprisingly good summary of the technology and theoretical aspects. 

WARNING : It runs for about 20 minutes and is worthwhile watching.

While the AI presentation contained inaccuracies—confusing device names with methods, occasionally getting technical details confused—typical misconceptions, like the Richard Dawkin's premonition of the discovery—it offered a far better starting point than the ill-informed clickbait posts "Scientist discover new colour" now flooding social media. The realistic conversation format makes complex scientific concepts accessible, but not totally trustworthy. Yet in this case, the so-called "deep dive" is impressive, hopefully the shape of things to come.

If you consider, yourself a careful observer you might spot telltale AI artifacts in the hosts' hand movements. Then again you might have already spotted the podcasts title "Deep Dive An AI Podcast" up in lights behind the presenters or the warning from YouTube "Altered or synthetic content" as the video starts.

Don't just accept what AI tells you—run it through your own filter first. Draw on your personal observations and whatever expertise you have, whether that's art, science, engineering, or any field you know well. AI is getting very impressive, but it's not infallible

see also Part 1 The Quest for Sea Green

Part2 The Discovery of Olo 

Part 4 The Magic of Rare Optical Phenomena

When Art Meets Science: The Discovery of Olo

Art and science have always been intertwined, but this connection has been reinforced in my recent experience with colour theory, painting, and an extraordinary scientific discovery. What began as sketches of surf rescue boats transformed into a meditation on the nature of colour itself.

From Sketch to Exhibition

My observations at Venus Bay, capturing the interplay between the red inflatable rescue boats and the sea-green illuminated waves, evolved into a series of paintings. The composition fascinated me—horizontal lines of waves contrasted against the strong diagonal of boats running up the surf, foam splashing dramatically in front.

I developed this theme through various sizes: sketches and smaller tests up to half-sheet paintings to perfect the colours and composition. Despite struggling with worsening eyesight, the work progressed well. The culmination was a submission to the Poetry of Watercolour exhibition at VAS, which was accepted—a gratifying validation of my ongoing colour exploration.

The Olo Discovery

Just weeks after my exhibition acceptance, an announcement emerged from the United States: scientists had discovered a new colour called "Olo." This wasn't just any colour discovery—it represented a new direction in how we understand human vision and colour perception.

I first heard of the discovery on local radio where Professor Ren Ng, originally from Melbourne, was interviewed, revealing something extraordinary. Olo isn't a colour we can see in everyday circumstances. It requires precise adjustments to how our eyes' cones are activated, specifically targeting mid-wavelength cones through sophisticated machinery.

The Science Behind the Sensation

They used a machine/system known as OZ Vision, after the equipment developer. This firstly has to map those cones, the eyes colour receptors in a tiny section of retina,.  Then, micro pluses of laser beams of very specific wavelengths—corresponding closely to turquoise and greenish turquoise colours—are directed at these cones. The S (shortwavelength) and L (longwavelength) responding cones were not targeted. Resulting in the viewer seeing an intensely vivid colour that closely resembles what Oswald called his "sea green." only much brighter.

What makes Olo particularly fascinating is its demonstration that colour sensation is essentially an illusion created by energy in the form of visible light of specific wavelengths. The discovery doesn't necessarily suggest colours exist outside the boundaries of the chromaticity diagram, or outside the rainbow as widely reported, but rather reveals new possibilities for how we might experience colour. While we may not see new ways to see a broader range of colours or artificial pigments immediately, the research opens possibilities for enhanced colour experiences, perhaps fixing colour-blindness and a deeper understanding of how our brains process visual information.

The name "Olo" is a little scientific geeky: 010, zero-one-zero representing the signal pattern to different cone types—0 signal to the S cones, 1 or full signal to the M cones, and 0 signal to the L cones. This precision underscores the scientific rigour behind what might otherwise seem like an abstract artistic concept.

Art as Scientific Method

Perhaps most remarkably, this experience demonstrates how artistic practice can parallel scientific inquiry. My methodical approach to colour matching, systematic observation of natural phenomena, and documentation through sketches mirrors the scientific methods in many ways.

The artist's patient observation of colour relationships, light conditions, and natural phenomena provides a different but equally valid path to understanding. When Rob Candy gave me that Wilcox palette, neither of us could have predicted it would lead to connections between 19th-century colour theory, contemporary surf rescue training, and 21st-century vision science.

This convergence reminds us that the boundaries between art and science are often artificial. Both disciplines seek to understand and represent reality, whether through pigment and brush or laser and laboratory equipment. The discovery of Olo proves that there are still new colours to be found—not just in nature, but in the remarkable machinery of human perception itself.

see also Part 1 The Quest for Sea Green

Part 3 AI, Technology and Traditional Observation

Part 4 The Magic of Rare Optical Phenomena

The Quest for Sea Green: Reconstructing Oswald's Colour System

When artist friend Rob Candy passed onto me a round Michael Wilcox palette—companion to Wilcox's book "Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green"—I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the Oswald colour circle. What seemed like a simple project to fill the 24-colour circle with my own watercolour pigments matching Oswald's colours turned into a fascinating journey through colour theory and the elusive nature of certain hues.  

The Challenge of Colour Matching

Researching the actual colours and layout to match the Wilcox wheel proved more challenging than anticipated. While reasonable examples of Ostwald's circle exist online, the colours captured and reproduced are, to put it politely, not very reliable. Matching small colour swatches is always difficult, but I was determined to fill the circle with original pigments from watercolour paint tubes I already owned.

Starting with the watercolour paints I had on hand, I managed to fill most pans, purchased a few additional tubes, and eventually had to mix a few colours myself. The result wasn't perfect, but it was a reasonable start that taught me valuable lessons about colour relationships, richest (highest chroma) colour mixes always came from mixes of adjacent pans. It was however, difficult to match the value (lightness or darkness) of colour shown on published wheels; frequently, my watercolour needed to be diluted.

Understanding Oswald's System

The concept behind Oswald's colour circle construction is rooted in opponent colour theory and four psychological colours: red, yellow, green, and blue. These form two pairs—red-green and yellow-blue—creating orthogonal axes in a planar graph.

In Oswald's work, his red was specifically a crimson red, while the green was what he frequently referred to as "sea green"—a bluish green or greenish turquoise. These colours formed the horizontal axis, with the magnitude representing colour intensity: one equalled the most intense red, while minus one represented the most intense green.

The vertical axis featured blue versus yellow, though Oswald famously struggled to find a yellowish blue that wasn't actually green. This challenge led to his systematic approach, with blue positioned on the base and yellow on the top.

The Birth of L*a*b Colour Space

Oswald's work included a third dimension—neutrals ranging from black (absence of light) through shades of grey to white. These three axes became known as L (lightness), a (yellow-blue axis) and b (red-green axis), forming what mathematicians and scientists among colour theorists embraced as the L*a*b colour model. It still forms the basis of the Natural Color System (NCS), and underlying metrics for colour grading in many cinema systems, demonstrating the lasting impact of Oswald's theoretical framework.

The Elusive Sea Green

Reasonable matches for most of Oswald's colour circle elements proved achievable, except for that troublesome sea green. Even after purchasing additional paint tubes, this greenish version of turquoise continued to elude me.

The solution came from mixing two adjacent colour elements: the notorious phthalo pigments that stain everything they touch—plastic palettes, synthetic brushes, and inevitably, fingers. These two "dangerous" but strong colours finally yielded a reasonable facsimile of Oswald's elusive sea green.

Nature's Colour Laboratory

The quest for sea green in nature took me down to Venus Bay. The surf beach runs essentially north-south, so late afternoon viewing faces west. In late summer and early autumn, when the sun angle is lowish, sunlight penetrates the waves, illuminating them with a beautiful turquoise, actually a green version of turquoise that even commercial pigments struggle to capture.

A slight offshore breeze lifts the waves, creating pure magic. This natural phenomenon provided the perfect subject matter for sketches, attempting to match these incredible colours with my developing colour chart. The scene was made even more dynamic by local lifesavers training in their IRBs (motorised surf rescue vehicles), jumping waves in displays of both skill and pure joy.

The sketches revealed something remarkable: they contained two important Oswald colours—the red of the inflatable rescue boat and the sea green of the illuminated waves. Ostwald's fundamental pair of complementary colours. The composition of horizontal wave lines contrasted with the strong diagonal of the boat created a perfect harmony of colour theory and natural beauty, proving that sometimes the best colour education comes not from books, but from patient observation of the world around us.

See also Part 2 The Discovery of Olo

Part 3 AI, Technology and Traditional Observation

Part 4 The Magic of Rare Optical Phenomena

Are the leaps and bounds in #AIvideo what we want?

They probably are exactly what people want. But first, I know exactly where that dismal robot in dystopian world in my last post came from, he lives in an even more dystopian and frightening universe within the multitude of tokens being accrued in the rapidly growing Large Language models.

WARNING you might find this video distressing

The German YouTuber called Fear Tube (there might be a hint there) who created it, notes.

I Asked AI to Create a World of Mysterious Scenes and AI Created a Mysterious World You Won't Believe! Immerse yourself in a fascinating world of epic fantasy! Breathtaking landscapes full of mystical creatures, steam-powered machines and impressive monsters await you in this video generated by artificial intelligence. A journey into a universe where magic and mechanics combine harmoniously.

AI video generation has exploded recently, and honestly, it's everywhere now. Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube are completely flooded with AI-generated content, though a lot of it feels pretty pointless. What's really concerning is how hard it's becoming to tell what's real anymore. Deepfakes are getting scary good at cloning people's voices and faces, and unfortunately, bad actors are using this tech to deceive people without any consent from those being cloned. And don't get me started on my feed constantly showing me these weird AI videos of scantily dressed women running around game worlds with giant weapons - it's not my thing at all, and I'd rather not see dystopian content either. There's also this trend of people making instructional videos about creating AI clones to run online stores overnight with chatbots and video avatars. I'm not sure I would be ready to trust them.

That said, some of the creative stuff is genuinely impressive. For some reason, my algorithm keeps serving me steampunk videos, and while I'm not sure why, they're incredibly detailed and almost surreal in a fascinating way. The dream-like surrealist videos are pretty interesting too, even if they're deliberately obscure. I've seen some AI-generated music videos as well - not really my taste, but I can see the creative potential there.

What bothers me most is the bias problem. Most AI-generated content features beautiful young mostly white women. Sure, you'll see young men, athletes, working guys, even older men, but older women are practically invisible. I don't think this is necessarily the AI's fault - it's more about the people using these tools and what they choose to create. It makes me wonder: can we actually be trusted with this powerful technology to stay creative and inclusive? 

What's Next for AIart? (Dystopian Surprise!)

Lately, I've been a bit out of the loop with the rapid developments in generative AIart. Life threw a curveball with some eye issues and a corneal graft, which severely limited my computer time – even with NightCafe's regular emails urging me to claim my daily free credits.

My vision is improving, and I decided to jump back in by following one of NightCafe's invitations. This time, the free credits led to another invite to join one of their weekly challenges; they even pre-filled a prompt for me! I only caught the first couple of lines but decided to see what might happen. I'd previously experimented with prompts about AI/robots making art, so I wondered if that had "seeded" my new prompt, or perhaps another AI had "scanned" my earlier work on NightCafe (nothing impressive, just me playing around with the generative AI tech, by the way).

The image generated quickly, and I was genuinely taken aback by how dystopian and depressing it felt. It struck a chord, echoing my own concerns about the "look-at-me" culture of celebrity-seeking masses, which often feels like a desperate race to the bottom. Are we, as real artists, being replaced by soulless images churned out by "pseudo-intelligent" applications, all designed to grab attention so that advertisers pay more? Was I becoming just another cog in a process, simply there to click a link or hit enter?

"A melancholic robot with glowing eyes, standing in an abandoned art studio, surrounded by discarded paintbrushes and canvases, with a single tear of oil streaming down its metallic face, in the style of surrealism, with melting clocks and distorted perspectives, reminiscent of Salvador Dali, with a matte background and a somber, introspective mood."

Upon looking at the full prompt (above) and selected Flux model settings, I realised this prompt was likely just a refinement of my last work from a month or so ago (when I was effectively blind in one eye), rather than a new AI "spoon-feeding" me. The original prompt was: 

"a blind artist being assisted by an AI robot to create a large abstract painting surrealism Salvador Dali matte background melting oil on canvas."

I had used the Dreamscape XL Lightning model, a diffusion style model I was starting to like. However, the results weren't very Dalí-esque. A couple of the generated options had reasonable likenesses of Dalí, but nothing suggested he was blind or that a robot was assisting him. he just looked sad. Plus, the backgrounds were sharp and detailed, not melting, surreal or painterly. Was I to blame?, "Does my prompt need refining?" Yeah-Nah I just lost motivation and stopped.

Perhaps this is the true moral of the story for the artistic and creative communities: Keep an eye on what's going on, but don't worry too much. There's a lot of real life happening away from your computer or phone screen, and it's okay to let the over hyped generative AIart 'race to the bottom.' A bit sad really, if we want to benefit from the technology.

P.S. I even used Gemini Ai (Gemini 2.7 Flash) to help fix up my dictated jipperish for this post!

Last night of dodgy one-eyed sight and trying to take some photos

The evening before my corneal graft surgery, I decided to venture out with my camera despite my severely compromised vision. With my right eye essentially non-functional any bright or contrasting lights causing lasting effects in both eyes, photography has become a challenge of trust in my camera rather than precision.

Adapting to Visual Limitations

My relationship with photography has transformed dramatically. Electronic viewfinders are now unusable, and even the flip-out LCD screens present a significant challenge. I've adapted by:

• Returning to spot metering in the centre of the frame (reminiscent of my old Pentax Spotmatic days)
• Trusting my camera's autofocus setting to use that centre point
• I don’t fully trust the cameras “averaging” exposure so I set up my Olympus's back wheel for quick exposure value adjustments
• Taking multiple shots to compensate for uncertainty

Despite these adaptations, my photography outings have become rare as my vision keeps me indoors most days.

An Evening in Parliament Gardens

I stayed near the hospital and across the road from Parliament Gardens for my pre-surgery evening. As sunset approached, I noticed St. Paul's spire beautifully illuminated by the fading light. Just as I captured the scene, the bells began to ring—perhaps marking the time or the beginning of a conclave to select the next pope.

After uploading to my computer, I enhanced the raw file using Olympus's Vivid Mode, I had slightly underexposed the scene to preserve the golden hour tones, so lightened the shadows marginally, and cooled the overall temperature to deepen the sky. Not bad for someone with compromised vision!

Moonlight and Palm Trees

The moon caught my attention next, visible at that perfect moment when its illumination balances with the sky's brightness. I framed it with a palm tree swaying in the strong breeze, slightly underexposed again, and trusted my focus on the centered moon. Back at the computer, I applied the same vivid treatment, cooled the colour temperature, and cropped the image to position the moon slightly off-center.

Dinner on Spring Street, with a bit of creative post-processing

We continued our evening at a café on Spring Street opposite the Parliament building. The ambience was magical—lights just coming on while the sky remained bright, creating that challenging exposure scenario where automatic settings typically give you a bleached-out sky and detail-less shadows.

Rather than being discouraged, I saw post-processing potential. Using Luminar Neo's AI sky replacement and relighting features, I enhanced the scene to reflect the warm, pleasant Melbourne evening we experienced. The result captured the ambience of outdoor dining perfectly, despite not having a spectacular natural sunset.

In these moments before my surgery, photography became not just about seeing perfectly, but about adapting, trusting my equipment, and finding creative ways to preserve memories despite visual challenges.