Zoë Williams did a piece once mentioning that she sometimes cycled in fishnets in order to ensure that people saw her.
Some years ago I performed an experiment to determine why some cyclists wear brightly-coloured garments with reflective trim. I prepared two cyclists, one wearing day-glo orange binman trousers and a fluoro yellow tabard with Scotchlite strips. The other (controlled for height, weight and so on) was dressed in a three-piece Harris tweed suit with matching cap. They were photographed in a range of situations and lighting conditions, using both a normal camera and lens and a second unit identical to the first except for the addition of a filter created by sandwiching between two glass plates a thin layer of the fluid obtained by draining the vitreous humour from the eyeballs of several Hackney carriage drivers licensed to operate in the Edinburgh area. We found that both cyclists were clearly visible in photographs from the first camera but that with the second (filtered) camera the tweed-clad cyclist was scarcely visible at all, appeared as a light herringbone-pattern distortion of the view in the background.
posts
