Billie's Folly

Although I spent years flying from San Francisco to Seattle, it wasn't until I started flying from Portland to San Francisco that the differences in the quality of the sunlight crept into my consciousness.  San Francisco is always bright and sunny, but it's a thin bright--almost like a very sheer white film filters the light.  This compared to the Northwest's richer light, that may not be as brilliant, but makes colors intense and truer.  I'm sure its probably due to atmospheric differences.  And it might also be the relative population and surfaces reflecting the sun in the Bay Area versus so much shadow and green absorbing the sun in Washington and Oregon.  Of course days and seasons make it variable, but it's a sense of the overall density of light that I get.