Drama 16 Stage Lighting

Date: 3/30/23

Time: 12:41pm

Location: The grid in the Schaeffer Theater

Objective observation: The main light is the one in the process of being focused. It’s a singular circle of off-white light originating from the grid and landing in a circle on the floor of the Black Box and illuminating you, professor, standing right in the center. There is also a light on the opposite end of the catwalk, a lamp on the desk where the gels and gobos live, which is giving off a significantly yellow-er light with green undertones.

Subjective observation: The light has the drama and theatrics of a stage scene, even though it’s only the focus. However, seeing it from above makes it seem a lot more practical and less whimsical, particularly for the light in question which does not yet have a gel in it. It’s a spotlight with zero direction.

Date: 3/17/23

Time: 3:11pm

Location: the Red Line on the DC Metro

Objective observation: The train has yellow lights in strips all along the edges of the ceiling, but they’re not very strong. Most of the light in the car is natural, coming in from the big windows. The sky outside is a monochromatic light gray – it was just raining – so everything is illuminated with fairly plain white light.

Subjective observation: It’s oddly pleasant for a Metro system. The abundance of natural light gives the space a clean feeling that is unusual for a train like this. Conversely, when we go through a tunnel and the ceiling lights are the only source of light, they become a sickly kind of yellow without support from the natural outside light.

Photo taken by me on August 1st, 2019.

Theme: single source artificial light

The man in this picture was my supervisor at the summer camp where I worked, Tel Yehudah, for the summer of 2019. His name is Teague. We were on a “shmira” shift, which meant we were part of the group responsible that night for making sure campers stayed in their bunks past lights out. Part of the shmira equipment was this huge flashlight that we were supposed to use to spot and identify campers. On this particular night, for whatever reason, we had balloons. Teague pressed the industrial flashlight against the balloon and it glowed this cool neon green as seen above. I love this picture so much. The color and glow created by the flashlight combined with the balloon is so slimy and unusual and it reminds me of how much fun it was to work with Teague.

Date: 3/10/23

Time: Noon

Location: women’s changing room in the Fitness Center at Hofstra

Objective: fluorescent square lighting tiles lining the ceiling make the entire room brightly and evenly lit. The floor has a reflective property that makes it shinier directly underneath the ceiling lights.

Subjective: I know this sounds obvious, but it feels like a gym changing room. There are no shadowy spaces, nowhere for anything to get lost, just tons of locker-covered walls and floors and benches. It’s comfortingly bare and the kind of place where you might want to hunker down in case of an apocalypse, or go to avoid nightmares. Everything is aggressively illuminated. No secrets here.

Theme: bizarre

Credit: photo taken by a friend on Nov. 22nd, 2019 at the Museum of Illusions in NY

Description: I love the energy of this picture. It’s me from four years ago, on a field trip of sorts to the Museum of Illusions, and in this room, the lights were set up in the back to cast three different and differently-colored shadows when you stood in front of them. It’s so weird and so cool – one of those things that looks completely unexplainable until it’s explained, and after that it makes total sense. As a bonus, this is also a neat example of additive color mixing (for example you can see where the cyan and amber lights overlap to make green). Anyway, everyone should do a Superwoman pose in front of illusory lighting.

Date: Feb. 26th 2023

Time: 5:29pm

Location: outside of Stuyvesant Hall, looking at Netherlands

Objective: The beginning of the sunset behind Nethies is this bright golden color and white in the brightest spots. The trees are silhouetted against the light, and the sky above it is gray.

Subjective: The light is comforting and warm, which is especially unusual for this month.  I was walking back from a fun acappella rehearsal with one of my good friends and the lighting was perfect for the mood I was in – it felt airy and pleasant and really uplifted my already-positive state of mind.

Theme: night life

Photo taken by me on Sept. 30th, 2022

Concerts feel like the epitome of “night life” to me, maybe just because I attend so many of them. This picture was taken at a concert for a band called The Maine – one of my favorite bands – on The Rooftop at Pier 17 in Manhattan, which is an outdoor venue. The multicolored stage lights mix together into this bluish-purple that is reminiscent of dusk or midnight. That string of lights in the background is the Brooklyn Bridge, and behind that a building with window lights on is visible, but what I find cool about the whole image and particularly those parts is that there’s a slight blur to the lights. It gives the picture a hazy vibe that I think characterizes night life perfectly.

Date: 2/24/23

Time: 5:50pm

Location: outside the Fitness Center

Objective: The sun is setting way off in the distance, and the lower half of the sky is mostly blocked by trees or buildings. The trees are dark silhouettes against a graying sky, which lightens to orange as it nears the horizon. A couple of outdoor lights on the buildings of Colonial Square illuminate the brick with white light. A window is lit from inside by a yellow light.

Subjective: The sky looks pretty, but cold. The colors don’t evoke any kind of warmth. Looking away from the sunset and into the monochrome expanse of the sky, it is vast and quickly darkening. It’s not quite unsettling but it gives the feeling more and more that something is hidden in the silhouettes. The sunset, by contrast, offers a gentle hint of natural light, while the outdoor lights on the buildings feel very industrial.

Photo taken by me, Feb. 7th, 2021, at 2:30pm. Hofstra North Campus.

Theme: cold

Description: Everything about this photo is cold to me. Not only does it depict a scene we know would be frigid in temperature, but the lighting drives home the feeling. The snow is so white, and though it makes the photo brighter, it does so without warmth – and I mean that in the sense that certain colors can be warm, and this photo contains none of them. The starkness of the dark trees against the pure white surroundings, including that blank, featureless sky, suggest cold simply by removing the possibility of sunlight. There is nothing in this picture to provide warmth, even in some small way.

Feb. 15th, 2023, 5:09pm, dorm in Vander Poel Hall

Objective: The sunlight is coming through my roommate Maggie’s window on the opposite side of the room. She has some burned-out gels taped to her window that Jim Hart once said I could take. Two are dark blue and five are a more cerulean color; she taped them up in the shape of a smiley face, with the dark blue as the eyes and the cerulean as the smile. The sunlight shines through the window, through the gels, and onto her wall, creating crisp shadows where the mullions of the window block the light and a dual-toned blue smiley face.

Subjective: This is a cheerful scene. The gels create a silly, colorful grin on the beige backdrop of our dorm room walls. I was on a video call with my grandparents, and I had to pause on my end just to take a picture of the sunlight on Maggie’s wall. There’s the barest hint of the beginning of golden hour in the glowy tint of the sunlight coming through, and it feels like a happy and comforting room to be in, at this moment. The light-lined shadow of the stacked blinds at the top of this sunny image make me aware of the fact that her blinds aren’t down, and that she has left them open on purpose, to let the light in and uplift the vibe around here. It isn’t hot, but it’s a warm environment.