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Great Light Makes Great Pictures
[Note: The TypePad site is not allowing me to upload new content easily. I did finally get the previous post to publish—or maybe someone at TypePad helped. I'll keep trying to publish this one and maybe eventually you'll see it. —Mike the stressed-out Ed.]
My old friend Phil Davis had a remarkable room in the large, gracious house he built out of concrete and precast concrete slabs in Whitmore Lake, outside of the city of Ann Arbor in the State of Michigan. I'd say the place was built like a brick except it was stronger and sturdier than any mere brick. Phil was the inventor of BTZS, Beyond the Zone System, a more technically rigorous version of Ansel Adams and Fred Archer's system of exposure and development control. Phil, who was of my father's generation and died in 2007, was a technical polymath, and had been a top advertising photographer for the Detroit automobile industry in the 1950s. It's a shame his car pictures were never collated and collected—some of them would be amazing period pieces today. But to him they were just work product. He was very unsentimental about photographs. Anyway his dining room had what looked to be absolutely gorgeous light, and there's a story behind that.
The room was a nice but normal-sized dining room centered around a magnificent George Nakashima live-edge dining room table (an original, built by George, not his studio). The room had one large panoramic window of the type that used to be called a "picture window" that was north-facing or nearly so; it might have caught a bit of direct late-afternoon sunlight in the summertime. So what Phil noticed was that the light in the room had varying qualities on the walls and ceiling. The wall opposite the window was brighter than the others; one side wall took on a subtle greenish cast from the woods on the ridge, the other a subtle bluish cast from the open sky. So what he did was to paint all the walls of the room to enhance the natural light that already existed—one wall a little more greenish, the opposite one a little more blue, the back wall a little brighter. This had the effect of intensifying the natural effect of the light. It was subtle enough that you didn't recognize what was going on at first, but the visual impression was close to magical—your impression was that the room glowed with an ethereal, otherworldly natural light.
Phil really understood light.
When he drew the curtains and turned on the room lights you could see it. Or, at least, you could see it as he described it to you. When he first showed the room to me, I had been at his house for hours—I'm sure he was waiting for the optimal time of day to show me the effect.
He was also a very patient guy. When he tested Fred Picker's contention that fixer was heavier than water and sank to the bottom of print washers, which was total bunkum, he mixed fixer and water in a bottle and let it sit for a year to see if it would separate. Of course it didn't.
I thought of him recently because I happened to install a daylight (cold) light bulb, 5600K, in the overhead fixture of my downstairs powder room, when the fixture over the sink has one of those old-fashioned style clear glass bulbs that are very warm, 2700K. Pretty sure they're universally called "Edison" light bulbs. I actually like the effect—warm and cool light play off each other in the little room, giving the visual impression that the cool light is coming from the single small high window.
Phil, who was of my father's generation, died in 2007. We kept up a daily correspondence for six or seven years before he got sick with his final illness. He was a deeply erudite, curious observer of the world, very thoughtful, and had truly forgotten more about photography than most people ever knew. He loved to design and run technical experiments in the large studio-darkroom that took up one end of his large house in Whitmore Lake—his wife Martha ruled the other end of the house, which contained the kitchen, the laundry room, and her office—she was a professional indexer, and a great proofreader too. The dining and living rooms were the neutral middle ground which they amicably shared. Some of Phil's many experiments I could induce him to publish in Photo Techniques, but some of them I couldn't—he thought they'd be too controversial and provoke backlash, and he didn't suffer fools gladly when it came to all the nonsense that true-believer types then believed about photographic technique. He had jousted in the past with many of them. He would just patiently prove them wrong in his own lab, with impeccable scientific rigor, and leave it at that.
Phil wrote several books. His textbook is of course outdated but I think parts of it are still of interest today. When digital came along he was nonplussed, despite having spent so much time and effort becoming a deep master of the older tech. He just set to understanding it and how it worked—and commenced to teasing me for being hidebound and old school, pretty funny as I was younger by 36 years. Phil had four grown sons, and I was the age, if memory serves, of the youngest.
Natural light studios? Who does that?
I used to do portraits by extemporizing natural-light studio setups. One of the best was in the second-story storage area of a very old (circa 1903) garage building at my grandparents' summer home. The building is now gone, at least from where it used to be—an eccentric cousin had it moved to his own property a few hundred yards away, where it now sits in the woods. Anyway on the second story there was one largish north-facing window, and a solid railing over which you could look down into the garage below. A subject (a friend) sat on the railing, and the distance into the unlighted background space made it look completely black. Some number of stops of illumination differential would make a background look black to B&W film—I forget now how many. The window was to her right and slightly in front of her. Then I took a white sheet and hung it just out of the lens's view to her left, for fill. Boy, did it ever look crude and primitive. But the result was as good as any portrait lighting I ever achieved. I used to try to replicate it with studio strobes.
I assisted for a top studio advertising pro in D.C. for a short time—I couldn't afford graduate school and was on a mission to educate myself by working down a checklist of my own devising of a variety of experiences in photography. Assisting for a studio pro was one of the items on the checklist. My boss was a master of artificial lighting—he probably had $100k worth of lighting equipment at his studio, and that was more money in the '80s than it is now. He asked to see some of my work once, and he was highly enamored of one particular portrait of a beautiful young model, done with another of my natural lighting setups. He kept gushing about how perfect the lighting looked, and asked me if I would describe the setup to him. I think he expected that I would refuse, because lighting setups to him were a trade secret, not to be given away to competitors or possible future competitors (it was thought at the time that most assistants would eventually go on to open their own studios, possibly competing with their former employers). When I described the setup to him he was incredulous. He kept saying, "that's natural light?!" He was a bit of a control freak when it came to lighting and didn't like using natural light even when he had to. On a sunny day he would move into the shade and set up his beloved Speedotrons to mimic sunlight. (Not really. I'm joking.) Finally, after staring at in silence for a good while longer, he flipped it dismissively on to the table top and said, "it's not really that good." Makes me chuckle—it was good until it couldn't be.
Here's a secret tip for making better photographs—look for great light.
You gotta get used to looking at light rather than at the thingy-ness of the world. It's not those things you're photographing—it's those things in that light. Light is ever-changing, and the same thing or scene will look completely different in different light. Great light helps make great photographs.
Mike
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