Page 76 - Lighting the Un-lightable 2015

Review

We learned many lessons in the "early days" that all culminated in 2005, in a

single image created by JD Milazzo. If you are familiar with that story, you will

remember that he and I were with a model, named Merlot, in the Burned Out

House. Owned by a friend, we were given the run of the house until renovations

started. Everything that now embodies our work and our methodology was born

and honed there.

Well, as JD prepared to create an image of Merlot, standing in front of a window

with her back towards us, I stood behind him, watching. "He's wasting his time.

That image will never come out."

In fact it did.

I stayed up all nyght analyzing the image and trying to determine why he was

successful. It came down to two concepts that would take the rest of that sum-

mer for me to refine and articulate:

 The difference between black and white is critical to the way

the camera sees a scene. The father apart black and white are, the

more difficult it will be for the camera to see the world the way our

eyes do.

 It isn't how much light there is in a space. It is how consistent the

volume of light is that determines how the camera sees the world.

This was a hard one to articulate because we don't often think

about how light fills space. So, thinking about how light fills space

required re-thinking everything I understood about the world.

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