Archive for the tag 'Light Observation'

Light Observation:

2/19/15, 6pm — some hole-in-the-wall store in the Garment District

I might have been in the fourth dimension last Thursday night. Michael and I had gone into the city to see a show, but before the show, he had to pick up some fabric for a dress he was making. It was seven degrees outside and we were getting around only by foot, so we chose the first fabric store we found in the Garment District.

There were tens of thousands of rolls of fabric — few of them looked new and clean. Most were old and dusty. The dust from these fabric rolls, combined with the fluorescent lighting, cast a strange white haze over the whole store. It was reminiscent of the lighting used for a Heaven scene in some comedy movie. And then there were the many, many colors from the fabrics on the shelves. More colors than on Joseph’s Dreamcoat. In warmer incandescent lighting, these colors would have been a welcoming rainbow of sorts. In this lighting, they were ultra-tacky and ultra-wacky. As I wandered the shop with a Penn Station beer in one hand and our tickets to the show in the other, passing by rolls of plush faux fur and of hideous shag carpeting, I wondered if I had entered the Twilight Zone.

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Light Observation 3

1. 2/14/2014

2. Light in the backyard at a party

3. I was at a party on Valentine’s Day. I was standing in the backyard with my friend Craig, talking to a mutual friend of ours. I looked up and I saw that the sky was a kind of light mauve; it was cloudy and absorbing the light from the surrounding urban areas. The people standing around were hit with the light from the house, their faces half lit with bright fluorescent light, their other half in shadow. It started flurrying, and the bright white snow was illuminated by the light coming from the back step. The texture of the snow against the soft pink backdrop of the sky seemed fittingly romantic.

Light Observation #3

1) 2/19, ~6:00pm, Lounge on 6th floor of Nassau

2) A sunset created shadows through window blinds.

3) It was what we call the “Golden Hour” in photography, meaning that the sun was that perfect orange color. I walked past the lounge and noticed a warm glow filling the entire room. I walked in and saw the blinds glowing a beautiful golden color, but when I turned around I noticed the shadow it was casting across the room. The beautiful striped shadow bounced off the white wall and filled up the entire room. I instragramed what I could. The neatest part was that when I came back five minutes later, it was completely gone. I was amazed by how fast light could change, and how briefly a moment like that could occur. It really made me appreciate how things exist in the moment.

Light Observation #2

1) 2/12, 5:00pm, Parking lot at Hofstra

2) The dark blue sky, the moonlight, and a street lamp combined to shine on a two large winter trees.

3) I was standing directly under two large trees with twisting branches when I looked up and noticed this beautiful combination of colors that was glowing from the trees. The first layer of light was the midnight blue from the sky above. This layer covered both trees completely and was the base of what I was looking at. The second layer was the moonlight, which only hit a certain side of the trees, creating shadows within the branches themselves. The third and final layer of light was a street lamp that rested within the trees. This cast a warm glow over an otherwise very coolly lit scene. The beauty and majestic mood set by the lighting could have been taking as dark or eerie, but I felt it to be much more relaxed and elegant.

 

Light Observation 2

1. Feb 13, 2015

2. Morning sun through window blinds

3. I woke up a half hour before my alarm went off this morning. I’m never up this early, when the sun rises over eastern Long Island and hits the face of my building. The room was filled with an orange crimson light, broken up by the slats of the window shades. Everything in the room looked soft and dreamy. I was not ready to wake up yet. The dreary thought I had, my mind still half-connected to sleep, was that I was in a warm oven, not quite finished baking yet.

“Miasma Sky”

2/10/15, 12:30am, outside Alliance Hall

The sky was doing wacky things as my boyfriend Matt and I headed back to his room following birthday festivities. It was an eerie mixture of purple, orange, and grey. A song called “Miasma Sky” often comes up on Matt’s auto-shuffle when we are in his car. Earlier that very day I had looked up what “miasma” meant:

noun, plural miasmas, miasmata
[mahy-az-muh-tuh, mee-](Show IPA)
1. noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluviaor germs polluting the atmosphere.
2. a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere.
I had a muddy image in my head of what a “miasma sky” would look like, but now I knew. The purples, oranges, and greys mixed together on a giant canvas to make what I will from now on refer to as “miasma.”

Lighting Observation 1

1. January 27, 2015, 2:00 a.m.

2. The night sky

3. I was in the backyard of my friends’ house during the snowstorm. The snow had stopped momentarily and for several minutes there was complete silence. The smooth snow cover reflected the light from the sky. Although it was the middle of the night, the saturated night sky absorbed all of the light pollution from the city and the surrounding areas. The sky was a matte lavender color and there was a low, flat light covering everything.

Lighting Observation #1 (or, Grizabella Moment)

1) Friday, 1/30/15, at 11:20pm.

2) A streetlamp in Colonial Square on a freezing night

3) I was doing a particularly miserable round of my complex, as I had the misfortune of being the RA on duty last night. One sight that almost made the frigid cold bearable was the poetic way that the streetlamp outside Williamsburg House, whose light was guttering and flickering in the wind, illuminated the path. Had there not been snow on the ground, the glow would have been lost on grass. It was eerie and desolate-looking, and reminded me of Grizabella’s song from CATS:

“Every streetlamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning
Someone mutters, and the streetlamp gutters
And soon it will be morning”

Lighting Observation

1) Thursday 5/1/14, 1:30 am, Intramural Field

2) Field Lights

3) The intramural field was severely flooded and looked almost like a lake. The lights from the field lights were on and are kind of bright by themselves. However, this night, the lights were reflecting off of the now lake intramural field. It created a very interesting look as the ground was very bright.

Light Observation

1. Saturday, April 26 2014 ~4:00pm, Barnes and Noble parking lot

2. I was getting in my car, leaving B&N and the sky was cleanly split in two between blue sky and storm clouds.

3. It was like something out of a movie, it was amazing. Behind me was this nice, calm blue sky that made you think you could just take a nap on the grass or walk the beach. But in front of me was this ominous dark blue/purple/grey mass of storm clouds that was slowly overtaking the serene blue sky. Of course, not two minutes later it started raining, which also began like a curtain coming towards me from the dark mass.

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