the power of light
Saturday, December 6, 2008 at 09:24AM 
Approximately 25 years ago I started picturing friends at our dining room table by candle light. It was a very informal thing.
Whenever we had friends over for dinner, which was a fairly frequent thing, at some time during the evening I would haul out the SX-70 and make pictures. In those days our dining room was festooned with candles and we always entertained by candle light and on occasion we still do - Xmas, Thanksgiving, and so on.
I have always liked soft subdued interior lighting and it could be accurately stated that the warmer that light the better - which accounts for the fact that I rarely use the "correct" light balance for indoor picturing. Most often, I make interior and exterior incandescent light pictures with daylight white balance and during the RAW conversion I tend to split the color temperature difference between 5200K and 3200K with a bias towards the warmer end of the spectrum.
BTW, if you have not had the pleasure of viewing Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, you should because it is a visual cinemagraphic masterpiece (I happen to like the story very much as well).
Kubrick began his rise to film making fame as his high school's official photographer. Shortly thereafter he became an apprentice photographer and later a full-time staff photographer for Look magazine. Much of the look of Kubrick's later film work was influenced by his still-picture making experience and sensibilities. IMO, never more so than in Barry Lyndon where so many of the scenes are basically exquisitely framed "still" shots with moving elements contained therein.
In fact, many of the scenes appear to be classic paintings from the era (circa 1750 - 1800) with moving elements contained therein. They are visually quite stunning. I was/am especially impressed with those interior scenes that Kubrick filmed entirely by the light of candles (in this clip go to the 1:43 mark). In an innovative move, he mated 3 f0.7 Zeiss still photography lenses (developed for NASA) to his motion picture cameras in order to do so. Once again, the effect - both visual and emotional - is stunning.
In any event, I consider today's picture to be of me having a Barry Lyndon moment. I have no memory of who made this picture but I suspect from the look on my face that it most likely was a woman.
Reader Comments (1)
Glad to hear someone else really likes Barry Lyndon. It's never been much appreciated in the world at large. It's time for me to watch it again, now that we have the bigger screen.