This is pretty much what I was coming here to say.
Don't forget that we live under a yellow sun, too. There is a hell of a lot of warm light in our world, natural and artificial.
Don't forget that we live under a yellow sun, too. There is a hell of a lot of warm light in our world, natural and artificial.
It would probably even work on a bunch of photos taken of a white wall in some natural light, if you averaged them out. More of an orange hue than pure white, certainly.
which is green
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#mediaviewer/File:Linear_v...
That is why grass/trees are green - they consume only the edges of the spectrum (about 10-15% of the total sunlight coming through) bouncing the rest back.
With respect to the original point about orange being average color of Internet photos - keep in mind that most photos are produced by digital CCD cameras which are more sensitive to orange/red than green/blue.
the plants consume edges of spectrum, so they would bounce the X wavelengths (green in case of our Earth) as it is just an unnecessary heat for them.
There's no real consensus on why. (There's some wild guessing that green photons might be too hot to handle: smashing fragile biomolecules apart rather than powering them... (http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=500) but then why does chlorophyll run fine on purple light?) You'd figure that there would be incredible selection pressure on increasing photosynthesis efficiency, but maybe they're stuck on a local maxima: it's not like a single mutation can turn a C3 plant into a C4 plant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_photosynthesis