Some Light Observations

Light Study #1: The Protein Shaker Ball
September 3rd, 8:00AM 
At my mother's kitchen table up in the mountains of Fairview, NC:

My youngest sister sits, her breakfast dishes emptied and forgotten at her elbow. While our mother discusses our day plans with me, my sister fiddles with the spring ball from a protein powder shaker. The sun is rising through the large eastern window that frames all of us in a plane of low bright light. It forms a radiant rectangular echo of the angled table we all sit at, our shadows elongated until taffy stretched shadow giants double our company on the back wall of the living room adjacent to the dining area. My sister's fiddling catches my eye and I stare transfixed at the oscillating object she twirls in the warm beaming sunlight. The silver glints off and on, blinding me in a smooth rhythm like the beam of a lighthouse. But it's not the glinting silver that rivets me. It's the shadow. Like the taffy giants on the back wall, the spiral of the shaker ball is made large and stretched into an exquisite oval form on the flat surface of my mother's table. It dances and undulates, perfectly defined as it dances and travels across the grains of the table. The light is so low and powerful that even the fine grains of the woodwork stand out in relief, infinitesimal wooden mountains reflecting a muted glint with their microscopic valleys cast into shadow. 

In summary, the light is low and powerfully bright, causing the shadows to be sharp, well-defined, elongated, and very dark.


Light Study #2: Just Before Noon At The Campus
September 5th, 11:45AM
Walking past the pines nearing the corner of Racine Dr and Randall in Wilmington, NC:

I am walking back towards my apartment, following the sidewalk with the road on my left, heading home from my morning class and thinking of the lunch I will soon be enjoying. A car drives by, belching its exhaust and making me turn my head to my right in my aversion. A beautiful dappled pattern of greens greets my gaze. The grass beneath the pines of campus is still and flushed in sunlit warmth and cool whimsical shade. I appraise the shadows and their placement in relation to the tree trunks. The boles are not yet centered in the clouds of shade that spread over grass and shed needles. As if beckoning me into further reflection, the shadows reach away from the forms that spawned them, drawing me in as they seem to shorten the distance between my position on the hard hot sidewalk and the cool softness of the trees and grass. I look at the closest cloudy form, a blue green shape stretched like a blanket against the turf. It's edges are not clearly defined, and the shadow is soft and gentle in its value change but certainly substantial enough to beautifully contrast with warm sunlit green of the grass not caught in the tree's shadow. I wonder if the edges are so soft because of the grassy texture they fall upon rather than the nature of the light itself. Testing this, I turn to my own shadow on the sidewalk. The farther away parts of my body cast a soft blurry edged dream shape upon the cement while my shoelaces leave a perfectly defined counterpart against the grey. I consider the nearest tree with its needles high in the air, even the lowest leaves a good two body lengths away from the earth. I suppose the dappling of cloudy shadows would be suggestive and vague in their definition no matter what surface they fell upon.

In summary, the light is high and bright but fairly diffuse. The vast majority of shadows are dark but with wide soft edges.