The Gryphon's Feather Studio: Photographic painting

A photograph is your vision, held together by light.

(Steve Coleman is a landscape photographer from Sydney, Australia; click on the link to head to his website and view his work.)

Light is the medium of photography. The word photography was invented in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is derived from the Greek words - φῶς (photos) "light" and γραφή (graphé) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light" .

Your camera's electronic sensor, much like the film that preceded it, makes a record of light. The sensor converts each light strike as a change in electrical charge and this is what is stored as an image.

Your eye kinda works like that too- photons strike retina's rod and cones cells and they in turn respond to the light. Like most things in your body the change is electrical- electrochemical... Didya know, your eye can detect just one photon of light? No, you don't see it, but it registers in your retina. (aha! finally a use for that semester of neuroanatomy and the semester of neurophysiology!) Light touches our photo-ganglion cells- which are not related to forming an image - but instead related to our body clocks- how we know to sleep in wake. Your eye is an out-pocketing of your brain.

You can detect amazingly subtle differences in the quality of light. We see light, of course, as color. Every color is our interpretation of a particular wavelength of light. But beyond that, when we don't think of the idea that we see the red of that red ball because the red ball really reflecting light at a wavelength of somewhere within 630–740 nm... wait, no one really thinks of that do they?

(I do have to tell you Joe and I have conversations about this stuff. About how are perceptions are shaped by physical criteria, and how we mostly blithely ignore said criteria, yet our perception of reality is determined by electricity and light. withut having smoked anything illegal. Joe really should have been a physicist... did I ever tell you he built a Tesla coil in his classroom? He's the art teacher.)

But, physics, or physiology, aside, if we just consider artistic color theory- we see light itself (and by this I mean the sunlight we see illuminating the world during our day) as having hue, chroma (the colorfulness in relation to another color), saturation (intensity), lightness (value or tone) and brightness (reflectiveness) - the same properties as the colors on the color wheel.

Consider the quality of light on a sunny, cloudless morning, in the summer-say 7:00 am? Now the same sunny cloudless day at noon? at 3 pm? What about a day that is so grey it could be evening? What is the light like outside? in your kitchen? at the office? What about sunset or twilight? What tone of color would you say the light has? blue? white? yellow? grey? pink? purple? green? pinkish-purple? greenish-grey? bluish-white? Yellowy-white? Is the light hard or soft? How intense is the light? How bright? What about the color of light in a shadow? What about candlelight? Lamplight with a incandescent bulb? A halogen bulb? an energy-saver bulb?

In other words, we see a nearly infinite variation in the qualities of light. As photographers and artists, we have an incredible, innate, intuitive awareness of light. We know. We are breathing light and color sometimes to overwhelm. We see.

Being conscious of the light, can help you direct your seeing, improve your photos, without needing to understand aperture and depth of field, without worrying about f-stop and speed. Just being more consciously aware of the light can take your photos someplace new.

Take a piece of white illustration board, mat board, or a piece of white card stock. If you would sit it in the light shining in your window- what color is it? How about if you move the white board to another more shadowed area of the room- what color now? Outside under the tree... what color? You can learn a a great deal by keeping one blank white piece of card/board slightly smaller than a page tucked in your journal, or a book you are reading, masquerading as a bookmark, and simply pull it out during your day and on into the evening, here and there, wherever you might sit. Make a mental note of the qualities of the light. Now, and then, check out the light thrown by various light bulbs or coming in various windows.

How does the color on the walls, the color of the tree leaves, the color of the furniture affect how the color of the light?

Did you ever take a buttercup as a child and hold it under someone's chin, to check to see if they liked butter? And if there was a yellow reflection, on the underside of their chin, it meant they did like butter? (we used dandelions, mostly.. and then with a flourish we'd, tuck our thumbnail under the flower head and say... "mama had a baby and it's head popped off!" as we flicked upward, popping the flower head off into the air... I still do this- I still have littles who are little enough to find this hysterically funny.)

When choosing paint colors for the walls of your home, the experts suggest living with a swath of color painted on a wall, to see how it looks through out the day. The appearance of the color is affected by the light, and the color of the carpet and furnishings. So many times, the paint color looks very different at home and not at all like the paint chip in the store... (Once when painting a little's bedroom apple green, I didn't "test" and went through three colors of paint- the first glowing like neon in the late afternoon+ceiling light, the second looked yellow, and finally I did get apple green, but the paint chip was grass green....)

What about indirect versus direct light? Out in the sunlit yard versus beneath the shade of your favorite tree? What about the light on the building lined streets of a city?

Light is ever-changing affected by time and place. You are working with a nearly infinite source of possibility for nuance.

All of this, the weather, the time of day, the presence of shadow or shade, the color of the objects in the place in which you stand, where you are standing, the light source... are part and parcel of each photograph you shoot.

Sure, you can change a lot things when post-processing in photo editing software. For me, and perhaps this is left from shooting film, when I am moving through my day, and I see something, you know, see something, I'm not seeing what I am going to do to that something later with photo editing software. I am in the moment, seeing, and I want that moment. To shoot that moment, I need to stay aware of the properties of the medium I am using- light. Where do I need to stand to take the photo I am seeing? At what angle do I need to shoot? Where do I need to be in relation to the light source? What reflective surfaces do I need to consider to acquire that image?

Yes, each camera has it's own limitations in terms of color and saturation and well, light. So, I may find, when I look at the photo on my computer later, that what I saw isn't quite there, and this is part of what photo editing will give you. Maybe, as I am tweaking, I realize I can get wildly creative with my editing and go someplace new. But, a poor image, a bad photo, makes all of that harder, or impossible, sometimes.

Your task is to make the choices when making a photo to create an image as close to what you see with your artist eye, not necessarily what you see, as possible. You, of course, want to make the best photo you can in each instance- we all know that. Being conscious of light is

You are capturing a moment in time- making a record of light. Whether you print and frame your images, or use them in journals, or share them on the web, you are creating. The process art movement has taught us to be conscious in the making, to consider what we are doing as we create, make, photograph, to communicate with some intentionality, to view art as a creative journey, not a product.

You are painter of light, it is your gift to the world, & more importantly, to yourself.

* this post is cross-posted from my class posts.