Notes and links from 27 Aug

Wally and Lav, impatient for the grass to go green again now it’s rained. There was a thing a few years ago, back when wildfires were rare and noteworthy, where people were noticing that their cameras weren’t taking accurate photos of the red skies, shifting the white balance so it looked a bit more “normal”. I’ve been noticing it on a more mundane scale when photographing the rabbits on our lawn. The camera is fine when the grass is green but the deep orange of the parched turf makes it want to shift everything towards a colder blue. I’m quite used to this in urban and artificial environments — a blue or orange wall is always going to need some manual tweaking — but you can generally assume that a balanced composition of nature is going to automatically calibrate correctly. I guess that’s a new marker of the climate catastrophe reaching you: when your camera can no longer approximate an accurate reproduction of how the world looks to you. Happy plug-in solar day in the UK! Of course…