All the Light is Good
I had been thinking about Andy Warhol saying, “All the Coke is good,” which inadvertently prompted me to remember, all the light is good. I’d been limiting my photography excursions to evening or mornings, because that is when many interesting or surprising things happen in terms of light. But when you’re on vacation, for example, you haul your camera around all day, you wear it like a drastic necklace to the detriment of your spine and neck alignment, and you take photos in all sorts of light. Your time in a place is limited, and so you take photos in all the light. All this, really, to say, make your art when you can in whatever light is available. Write in early mornings, during your lunch break, don’t wait for a perfect time. The perfect time is now.
So, yes, today, the subject is light. It’s something I’ve written about on this blog a fair bit. Other posts you might like to re-visit:
In the post about light and writing prompts I shared this on kinds of light:
A poem I wrote in my book Asking was inspired by this quotation by Sven Nykvist, and you can riff on it, too.
"Light can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft."
– Sven Nykvist
My riff goes like this:
Light Can Be
by Shawna Lemay
And light can also be wintered, compassionate, worried, filled with birdsong and jasmine tea, sharp, worried, slight, revealing, watery, curious, blue.
Light can be mild, cutting, still, flickering, unswerving, bewildering, slanted, easy, difficult, smudgy, foggy, soothing, divine, muscular, oblique, buttery, flimsy, relentless, unasked for, ordinary, inspiring, indefinite.
Light can be nervous, intricate, filigreed, lemony, zen, fizzy, frenetic, bold, weak, soothing and light can be
open.
What is light for you now? There are so many kinds of light. Every day the light is different. It illuminates this then that.
I’m very fond of the website that tells me what kind of light there will be in Edmonton at what time of day — civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight, night.
Last week we went out to visit a sunflower field in the late morning. It was a sweltering day and already bright and hot. When it’s that bright it’s tricky to get the settings on your camera so that not everything is an overexposed mess. So what happens is you rely on all your knowledge that you have accumulated to this point — you try out some settings, you try out others. You try in the bright sun to look at your view screen, cupping your hand over it so you can see a bit better. You squint, you hope. In the end, you’re going to delete a lot of photos. Some of them would have been good if you hadn’t messed up. If you’d dialled down this, or moved a bit further over or back, or if you’d crouched down, maybe they would have been better. In the end though, you have something, because you walked out in the available light, you attempted.