why is your shadow always black ?

Question

i just wondering; no matter what color you wear, your shadow is always in black?

Answer 1

Hi. Your shadow is only NEARLY black in space without a sky to diffuse light all around you. And if you worn translucent cloth the shadow would be edged in the color of that cloth. So your premise is not correct, sorry.

Answer 2

A shadow is a region of darkness where light is blocked. A shadow occupies all the space behind an opaque object with light in front of it. The cross-section of a shadow is a two-dimensional silhouette, or reverse projection of the object blocking the light.

Contents
1 Features
2 Colored shadows
3 Faster than light
4 Other notes
5 Fiction
6 Heraldry
7 See also



Features
Shadows from a chandelier
showing umbra and penumbra Shadow in Berlin...The closer to 90 degrees the angle between an elongated object and the direction of the light it blocks, the bigger its shadow. The smaller the angle between the direction of the light and the surface on which the shadow occurs, the longer the shadow is. If the object is close to the light source, the shadow is large. If the surface is curved there are further distortions.

For a non-point source of light, the shadow is divided into the umbra and penumbra. The wider the light source, the more blurred the shadow.

If there are multiple light sources there are multiple shadows, with overlapping parts darker, or a combination of colors. For a person or object touching the surface, like a person standing on the ground, or a pole in the ground, these converge at the point of touch.


Colored shadows
If white light is produced by separate colored light sources, the shadows are colored.

Illuminate a room with a red light, and the shadows are exclusively gray, or dark. Illuminate the shadows with a white light, and the shadows are green. Where both lights are blocked, or in other words where the shadows intersect, the shadows are gray. Away from the intersection, where the red light is blocked the shadows are green, and where the white light is blocked the shadows are red. In other words, light colors shadows or brightens them, according to the complementary color of the light blocked to cast the shadow. In the case of white and red lights, the complement of white is red; with white and green lights, the complement of white is green.

In the absence of multiple light sources, colored lights illuminate spaces where other lights are not blocked. In the above example, the red shadow cast by blocking white light is not a shadow with the white light off, but it is illuminated in red.

In the absence of white light, colored lights blocked by an opaque surface cast shadows in the colors complementary to the lights blocked. For green light, red shadows, and vice-versa; blue, orange; yellow, purple; intermediate light, intermediate shadows.

Shadow of text inverted
Faster than light
For objects moving at every-day speeds (much slower than the speed of light), the shadow cast by an object will move faster than the object which casts it. A cross-section of a shadow (a silhouette) is displaced by the motion of an object in front of a point source of light. The further the distance from the object blocking the light, the larger the silhouette and the greater the displacement by motion.

However, this simple relationship between speeds and distances becomes more complicated over vast distances for very fast moving objects due to the finite speed of light; the motion of an object may cut off the emission of light from a source to a surface, but the light that had already passed by the object will take some time before reaching the surface, and so there is some delay before the shadow on the surface reflects the updated position of the object. Thus while it is certainly possible to create shadows that move faster than light[1], this effect cannot be used to transmit information at superluminal speeds, because the motion of the shadow is being caused by the motion of the object in the past, not the present.

Other notes
A shadow cast by the Earth on the Moon is a lunar eclipse. Conversely, a shadow cast by the Moon on the Earth is a solar eclipse.

On satellite imagery and aerial photographs, taken vertically, tall buildings can be recognized as such by their long shadows (if the photographs are not taken in the tropics around noon) , while these also show more of the shape of these buildings.

A shadow shows, apart from distortion, the same image as the silhouette when looking at the object from the sun-side, hence the mirror image of the silhouette seen from the other side (see picture).

The term shadow is also used with regard to other things than light, for example rain: a rain shadow is a dry area, which, with respect to the prevailing wind direction, is beyond a mountain range; it is dry because air masses lose part of their water when they move over these mountains.

Furthermore, it is possible to see shadows by moonlight on clear evenings.

Answer 3

The light that your body blocks will be absent from your shadow. It doesn't depend on the color of clothes you are wearing. If you are standing in a place lit up by one white light, your shadow will be without that light and its color will be gray or black.

Try standing in a place where there are several lights of different colors, such as a stage or dance floor. The light your body blocks will be absent from the shadow, but the other colors will be there. For example, if the stage is lit with a blue light and a red light, the shadow your body casts as it blocks the blue light will be reddish, since the shadow area is still being lit by the red light. And the shadow you cast with respect to the red light will be blue. The place where these shadows cross will be gray or black.

So shadows can be colored, too, depending on the lighting. It's pretty groovy, isn't it?

Answer 4

This has to do with light. White light is all colors. The sun and lights give off white light/or all or most colors. You can see this by using a prism to separate the colors out. The absence of colors is black. So your shadow is black b/c you are blocking the light

btw: This is the exact opposite for paint, all colors = black. Lack of colors = white.
Best of luck.

Answer 5

Shadow means less light falls on a certain area, the colors of this area are darker, compared to colors in the lighted area, because the shadowed area receives and reflects less light. shadow is not black, it's dark.

Answer 6

The reason is shadow is not image and no light passed through you then shadow is formed so it is black

Answer 7

My shadow isn't black for all time....it rather is purely a darker hue of the underlying coloration. once you paint shadows, you do no longer purely plop some black paint on the canvas to be the shadow (except you're an abstractist), you blend in some darker tones of the underlying coloration to tone it down.

Answer 8

Because a shadow is the absence of light ☺


Doug

Answer 9

its an area blocked out by the sun - so it isnt brightened - so its dark - not black

but were oblique so the sunlight wont go thru us there for it wont change the colour of a shadow - if we werent we wouldnt cast a shadow

Answer 10

"Ones shadow is black because it is a reflection of the collective human soul, which is black..."

I know, not the "Geek scientist" answer.... But I like it none the less.