Lightheaded

I mused a bit this afternoon.
Having got up at an almost respectable hour and taken a lot of pictures (no, really, a lot) I was driving home, making a huge effort to stop suddenly swerving all over the road and swooping into gateways without any warning for other, unsuspecting drivers...in order to scramble out clutching camera and making odd noises and random mutterings about being hungry and but it's got to be worth just this one more picture.
And I thought, amazing how light changes everything.
(Which led me to think that anyone who has religious convictions will understand that concept in quite another light...which in turn led me off on some musings about faith untill I turned another corner and saw a new light on a new view...which led me back to light)*
In today's sunlight, every corner reveals a completely new place that just wasn't there yesterday.
I wanted, in fact to go to all the places I went yesterday, just to see them in a new light.

The first thing you learn as an artist is how to see what light does to things...how it shows you the form of a thing. A child draws a line round what she sees and believes that inside the line is the thing. When you learn to see light falling, you realise that the thing is there already, on your page...all you have to do is see that the light will shine on one side where it comes from. The shadows where it's blocked show that there is another side. The intensity and depth of light and shadow show how the thing curves away from and into light and has still more sides and planes and angles and...form. Light reflects off it and across it and shadows lie under and around it...the form is in...space.

As a photographer (albeit an entirely unlessoned one**) I have rediscovered light in a different context. There is form and space of course. And instead of trying to create an illusion which will make you think you are seeing light, making a form in space, you try to capture a reality which is profoundly changed by the light that illuminates it and the colours that light reveals. Indeed, with a camera, you are actually trying to capture the light to use it as a painter would use a brush***
Instead of talking about form, you talk about depth, light and shadow filling the space between here and there.
And colour. There's something quite different about the way light makes colour in a photograph from the way an artist uses it in a painting...I'm not quite sure how this works but it is different...I'm a bit casual about colour, I don't know much about it but I know what I like!

I think I'll stop there...I'm exploring the whole thing and while some years' art study may have taught me some useful words about art, I don't have a great many useful words to apply to photograpy. Which rather makes me think that it may be true that it's much easier to think if you have a vocabulary to do it with. (though it's important to bear in mind how enormously a vocabulary can constrain your thinking...there's another post. I can borrow from Frangelita's dissertation on journalistic vocabulary...correct me there Frangelita, I can't remember what it was really about:)

Yesterday's grey, flat light on a path leading away under some ancient yew trees.
Today's brilliant sunlight on a path leading through hazel and oak.

For ILTV...a hare jumping over the moon :)
Or would you prefer the one that jumped a little later on when the light was beginning to fade and the hare became a distant silhouette....Ooh, I'm getting all poetical now!
I do so enjoy a bit of thinking now and then. I think I'll go to bed now..G'night, sleep well and may all your dreams be light :)


*So I may just do a post on Faith tomorrow, if I can remember what I thought...well you never know, stranger things may have happened.
**Except for two weeks at art college and two days from my photographer friend :)
***Or a chisel or a pencil or whatever, I'm simplifying...I talk too much already :)