green poplar exposure series
"Green" in this case refers to the color of the wood, not the state of its seasoning.


the raw wood before exposure. I've drawn a black pen line across the middle of each piece and put a cardboard sheath around the left side of each, with the right side exposed to direct sunlight for a few hours a day and to strong indirect sunlight for several more hours a day.

The pics have been taken at various times, sometimes with indirect sunlight coming in through a window next to where I take the pics and sometimes at night under just incandescent floods. This variation in lighting accounts for the differences in color that you see. For example, the week 3 shots show all of the wood lighter in color than most other weeks, although not by much. I've used color compensation to account for all of this as much as possible, and generally it has worked pretty well, although if you look down below at the 3-year pic at the bottom of the page, which has the most accurate color of any pic on this page, you'll see that "pretty well" isn't all that good.

You'll note that the change in color of the veneer is much stronger than that of the plank. I attribute this to the fact that the plank is relatively smooth and the veneer relatively coarse, which means that the veneer actually has considerably more "surface area per square inch" and thus absorbs more light and air.

NOTE: the color on the first pic in this series (above) and the color
in the last pic in this series are both correct. Most of the shots
in between have too much brown and not enough green.


after one week with the right side exposed to direct sunlight (behind window glass) for several hours a day and the left side covered, the veneer is clearly turning brown but the plank is relatively unchanged. As you can see below, the veneer does not darken much further from this point on but the plank does.


two weeks --- now the plank is also beginning to darken.


3 weeks


4 weeks


5 weeks


6 weeks


7 weeks


8 weeks --- the veneer hardly seems changed since the first week and the plank seems not much changed since the 2nd or 3rd week.


14 weeks


5 months --- this pic has the 2nd best color representation of any on this whole page (the best is the 3 year pic at the bottom of the page)


6 months --- color correction is WAY off on this; I seem to have bleached out all the green


3 years, 2 months, but after 6 months the piece was put in my basement which has very limited indirect sunlight and no incandescent light, just flourescent. This pic has the best color representation of any on this page and as you can see, the portion s that were not exposed to light have not lost any of their green and the exposed portions have changed almost not at all since the 6-month pic was taken (the plank had very little green to begin with)