Looking and Seeing: Assignment: Light as Light:

Section Five:  Light, Texture and Pattern

Assignment:  Light as Light:  As with the color exercise, the purpose here is simply to raise awareness of light.  The authors suggest not shooting for aesthetic effect but simply to capture perceptions of light.  When you begin, set your intention, synchronize with reality, and be sensitive to flashes of perception.  Fill the frame with the flash, and try as best as possible to reproduce that flash with the camera.  They suggest doing this assignment in the early or late part of the day as the low angle of the sun produces more noticeable light.  They note that light always comes as some form of color, and that shooting light also requires shooting shadow.  The two always manifest together and they explain that this really a question of foreground/background. 

Went to Qusais this morning to do the assignment and observed that like color, light does not exist in and of itself.  Light as light can’t be photographed, nor can it be seen.  Light always has color, apart perhaps from staring into the sun or a lamp.  Light always has form.  If the light is pervasive, then whatever form is observable or captured is the shape of light.  Otherwise, light is a circle, oval, triangle, rectangle, square, stick, or blotch.  In fact any randomly made image, pointed in any direction at anything will reveal a manifestation of light.  I shot for an hour, took 45 images, a few of which are duplicates, and largely resisted the urge to shoot things other than light.

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