Sodium lamps begin to fade amid the night cityscape. I’ll probably miss them when they start disappearing.

Sodium lamps are cheap (or at least they were), long life and very efficient. They can work for up to 10 years (as happens in Bulgaria). Their minus is the bright yellow light they emit. Mercury has similar advantages but is less effective. Mercury lamps illuminated the highways (their light pulsed slightly blue-green). But they are probably already better than the sodium ones.

Sodium lamps became mainstream around the 1930s (ie they have been in use for almost 100 years). Just their bright yellow light gives me a sense of timelessness and reminds me of childhood. And the yellow light makes them impractical for anything other than street lighting. They have white glass balls in the parks in a pathetic attempt to make the light a little whiter. If they are the only source of light, they sometimes make it difficult to recognize colors.

Due to the economy of scale, cheaper transport costs and, above all, the easy integration with solar panels, everything is now being replaced by diode lamps, which have the same advantages but glow in white. In richer countries, they are more rare and there are already secondary hashtags – sodium lamps and the like. I suspect that soon it will become fashionable among Bulgarian pishman photographers and influencers to take pictures in the evening under yellow light. Filters cannot convey this feeling – even through my clumsy photo with a cheap phone, the specific yellow evening nostalgia seeps through.