Study the light

I don't know if this little experiment would work as well in new construction, where the houses are often plunked down willy nilly on their lots, but we live in a home from the 1950s that was carefully oriented with respect to the trajectory of the sun. It has definitely been worth the effort to study the movement of good light around the house as the day progresses. In the morning, the laundry room is suffused with warm light which is further softened by the semitransparent window.

This photograph was made using the Voigtlander Bessa TM with a classic vintage Pentax Takumar 105 mm f/2.8 lens. The image pleases me because, while it suggests that the moth might have flown out of the vase, in reality, it is crawling around on the outside of the window while the vase is inside on the sill.

Late in the day, if the sun is out, light rakes across the walls of my studio. In this digital capture, I pushed the highlights up in post production to make it look more like what I experienced.

 

Josef Sudek is rightly famous for images he made around his atelier. I thought I could do much worse than to channel my inner Sudek and learn about the light in my own little neck of the woods.