This lecture started off with the question, what is light? Well, it is essential for photography and we can manipulate it to create different outcomes.
Here is a Google definition of what light is:
light –
Noun:
The natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible; electromagnetic radiation from about 390 to 740 nm in wavelength.
Verb:
- Provide with light or lighting; illuminate: “the room was lighted by a number of small lamps”.
- Come upon or discover by chance: “he lit on a possible solution”.
Adjective:
- Having a considerable or sufficient amount of natural light; not dark: “the bedrooms are light and airy”.
- Of little weight; easy to lift: “they are very light and portable”.
We were then asked about a circle and to draw one. What do we have? It is a 2D shape, however we can make it 3D if we just add shading, which represents the light upon the shape. This way we can explore the relation of light to photography and apply the same principles.
The camera obscura was the first original camera, and this allowed light to enter through a small aperture into a dark chamber where it would make a mark on a tablet/mirror/sensor/paper to create a photograph. Being an author of an image is important, and learning to use perspective within photographs helps with this.
Harold Rheingold – Virtual Reality (1991)
Explored the use of cave paintings, which relates to virtual reality because it was a way of communication for that time period. The idea behind these paintings could be to show simple things like the progression from boyhood to manhood.
So what is light made up of? Well, it consists of wavelengths. The human eye can only see certain spectrums of light, shown in the diagram below:
The light wavelength is a very small fraction of what the big picture is! The human eye cannot see most of the wavelengths. We can use different instruments to help us see these different wave lengths like x-rays and infrared filters.
Nick Veasey looks at the use of x-ray through his work such as this:
There are so many different things you can do with light, such as strobe photography. This involves long exposures with multiple flashes to capture images such as these from Harold Edgerton:
Light can also be the subject and shape the structure of a photograph like the work of Antony McCall where he using a line of light which appears as a cone:
We also see through photography that light is used as a measurement. Eadweard Muybridge used this to measure how a horse runs and whether all of it’s legs touched the ground or not. This was a discovery for Muybridge.
http://www.jonathan-shaw.com
j.shaw@coventry.ac.uk
@time_motion
Kerrie Caine 
