Drama 16 Stage Lighting

2) Photo By Nic Christopher. Taken 22 March 2010 at 5:30 PM in Vancouver, Canada.

3) THEME: Cold

4) DESCRIPTION: I usually find pictures and paintings of flowers and plants to have a warming and happy feeling to them however not in this image. Vancouver is a very wet and rainy place. In the spring the normal weather one would find would be clouds and rain. The lighting becomes very flat and gray. I found these flowers growing just off the beach in town and thought it was a very pretty image. When I uploaded the picture to my computer I noticed that the lighting had influenced the saturation of the greens and purples in the flowerbed to become muted and less brilliant. The very tip of the purple flower is very vibrant however it is the lighting that falls on the background that creates a colder feeling to me. The greens seem to reflect the gray tones of the sky and the rain that had fallen earlier that day. What really speaks to me in this image is the fact that such a vibrant picture has been altered by flat gray lighting to make the entire image feel cold rather than warm and spring like.

1) 1/29/12 – 10:30AM – My Dorm Room (Netherlands)

2) OBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: On a clear morning the sun was shining brightly on my closed window shade and light bled into the room and lit it up, no other light source was on.

3) SUBJECTIVE DESCRIPTION: This past weekend was not the best I have ever had. I went to bed feeling pretty blue and helpless on saturday night and didn’t really have much motivation or energy as I closed my eyes. Luckily, I slept clear through the night and did not find myself tossing and turning very much. My sleep went uninterrupted all night and into the morning until around 10:30 when the sun really started to beat down hard on the single square window just to the left of my bed. Each window inside every room in the Netherlands Complex is furnished with a cheap and hardly operable window shade that takes a good five minutes to lower each night. It is the type of shade that has two long strips of fabric running from top to botom holding onto paper-thin strips of metal that when meshed together make a somewhat solid shade to block out the light from outside.

This clear morning allowed the sun to penetrate the atmosphere with ease and hit the shade with great intensity. This is when I was finally awoken from my dreams of the past and brought back into my reality. After I opened my eyes and woke my body up a little bit I threw my glasses on and looked to see what had brought me back to my reality. I scanned the window and and saw the sunlight beaming through the window, onto the tips of each white metal strip. The concentrated light on each panel was then forced through each crack between the panels and  lit my room in a muted glow. The light on the window shade was brilliant and vibrant as it peaked through; its color a very pure white. The light in my room however had a colder feeling, and was flat and muted as it bounced off the walls. There were no shadows, just a soft glow. I laid in bed for a while staring in silence thinking about my dreams and rationalizing all the old stuff that had been bothering me for the past few days. I was in the same mood that I had been the night before while I laid there constantly reflecting back on the past few years of my life. Then I looked at the window and realized the irony that in my room, the lighting was so flat and cold yet right there at my window the light was so vibrant, intense and warming yet I had my window closed, shutting that rejuvenating and happy light out of my room. Turns out that after I opened my shade, my mood was able to improve and I got some energy and motivation back once again.