Jar of beans

I found myself in a more covered outdoor area of the coffee shop and noticed the tables had interesting little glass jars filled with white beans as centerpieces.  I thought they made for a good subject for my light journal.  Since I am in an outdoors but primarily covered area, it is sort of dim.  However, the light from the overcast sky diffuses inside through the open windows and makes for a soft light on everything.  In addition, although it is a mostly outside area and it is only mid afternoon, the bar-style neon signs are still on, emitting blues and reds around various areas of the room, including some areas of the glass jar.  The glass of the jar is completely clear.  It is shaped somewhat light a cube that rounds out into a cylindrical opening.  There is a ribbed  metallic covering over the lip of the jar, perhaps a modified version of what was originally the jar top.  The grooves of this catch the light and make shadows here and there.  As this part is metallic, it is not opaque and it has a shiny, smooth surface aside from the ridges of the grooves. The rim is also wrapped in a small, mostly opaque but slightly see-through, tattered ribbon.  The light hits this but does not reflect shiny the way the other materials do.  Inside of the jar are hundreds of little white beans.  I'm not actually sure what kinds of beans they are because I am pretty sure navy beans are bigger than that, but they looks like hundreds of tiny little taupe eggs.  They all have enough shadow and light around them that each is outlined and separate looking from one another.  In the shadows, some of the beans appear to be different variations of grey, lavender, light brown.  For the most part, the light hits the jar pretty directly, but towards the top where the mouth rounds out, the reflections distort and bend.  As it is an overcast day, I begin my observation without rain, and a mere minute or so in the rain begins to pour outside.  I am mostly covered, so the rain just drips along the walls and by the windows, making for soft shifting of shadows on the jar.  The jar is not really affected much, but when people pass by on the left, the red/orange and blue reflections from the neon and the white reflections of the overall light disappear.  A few minutes before my observation ends the rain properly lightens up.  Again, there is little obvious affect on the light on the jar.  By the end, little has changed with the light quality.  I suspect this is because there are so many clouds in the sky that the movement of the sun has little influence on the way the light is diffused across the sky

 

Jar of Beans from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Cuppa Coffee

It is an overcast afternoon as I begin my observation here at the coffee shop.  With the threat of rain, I choose my location wisely and sit underneath a tin roof.  Unlike before, I've decided to place my subject before me, rather than look around for one.  Today my subject is my half full/empty coffee mug with a thin, wooden stirring stick.  It is blue, but has a red/purple quality that the camera does not seem keen to pick up.  I have placed it on a dark wood table, atop a dirty white napkin.  One of the first things I notice is how reflective the mug is.  The rim of the mug lips out slightly, and since the light is sort of diffused through the clouds and hitting in every direction, the outer most protrusions of the rim have a little specular reflection on either side of the cup.  the handle of the mug also has a little reflection on the interior of its curvature inside of the shadow.  The best example of this mug's reflectivity, however, is the body of the cup itself.  Where the bottom meets the napkin, there is an obvious mirror reflection of this napkin on the cup's face.  I move my hand around to see just how much reflects into the cup's body and at a short distance my hand also reflects into the cup. Although it is close to noon, there are no apparent shadows because of how soft the light is.  Only about a minute into my observation, the threat of rain becomes true.  For a couple of minutes we are hit by a hard rain from a side angle.  I take out my colorful umbrella to protect my observation area (and myself!) from getting drenched.  I keep my umbrella covering us for the remainder of my observation period, but for the last 10 minutes the rain is more gentle.  The red from my umbrella does not make for too much of a color change on the mug, but it does keep the light extra soft.  Although the umbrella is opaque in appearance, the surrounding light passes through and diffuses without casting any real shadow.  By the end of my observation, little has changed from the beginning outside of the rain.  However, the overall softness of the light through the clouds makes the changes almost entirely unapparent.

Cuppa Coffee from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Silhouetted Tree

As I took an evening walk around the perimeter of my apartment complex, I came across a really nice image of a tree branch full of leaves silhouetted against the sky.  I really liked the dark quality of the picture, so I decide to use it as another light observation.  As it was the last time I tried to find a subject in natural light this late in the day, manmade lamps are nearly unavoidable.  However, the tree I am looking at does not have very much manmade light hitting it directly.  In fact, this side of the street has no lamps, making for a relatively dark area compared to the light on the other side, where lamps are distributed about every 20 feet.  Tonight, the sky is pretty cloudy, but bluish white light of the moon pokes through every so often.  The sky looks like a desaturated shade of purple or lavender, with the smokey clouds influencing the way it appears.  From where I stand the leaves of the branch I focus on appear almost black.  The little leaves on the left side of the branch are especially dark and look blackest, where as the leaves on the bottom right region look to be brown or even yellow.  At first I think this is an indication of the fall season and that the leaves are dying, but upon closer investigation they are actually quite healthy leaves that probably look green in daylight.  I can tell, however, that the leaves look brown/yellow as a result of the reflection bouncing back up from the grey/dirty street (probably an area of road in a pool of light from the lamps across the street).  There is no obvious cast shadow that I can see from these leaves specifically, but if I turn my head and look to the left behind me I can see the the shadows are long, dark, and sourced at the root of the tree.  The shadow from the leaves is probably somewhere far off behind me, give or take 20 feet.  I continue to watch the leaves as they move gently in the breeze.  Over time the moonlight's influence becomes more intense because the clouds move around, and the leaves on the left side pop out a bit more than they did before.  Also over time, the light on the leaves changes because of cars driving past in either direction, or the cars driving through the nearby intersection.  The lights from these are almost always blue-white, and the intensities from them vary as they move.  For example, the cars driving at the intersections only subtly cast a light on the edges of the leaves, making the individual leaves more apparent.  When cars pass on the street where the tree is, the leaves are nearly entirely illuminated by artificial light, making their color a washed out version of their green pigment.  By the end of my observation little has changed.

 

I had a little trouble capturing what I saw with my camera this time, primarily for lack of light.  I tried several settings and video settings, but in the end I think the only one to closely capture what I saw was the "foliage" setting of my camera (as it realized to open the aperture to f2.8 and used no flash).

Silhouetted Tree from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Metal Chair

Moving away from nature after doing 4 entries, I decided to look at something manmade. My subject today is a metallic chair, much like the one I sat on while observing. It is about 5 pm, and I am sitting outside of Which Wich under the shade of the concrete overhead. The way the chair I am observing is situated, however, the sunlight hits it directly from an angle on it's left (my right) side. The chair is primarily in the shade except for the one spot of light that spans less than half of the back of the chair in height and about 2 inches in width. Here, the light reflects off the chair in a slight yellow and grey. The material of the chair, as implied by the entry, is metallic and grey. There is also some light hitting the base of the seat and reflecting back, and a subtle reflection of the light bouncing from the brick on the ground. The legs are made of a cylindric pipes on either side that were bent into arches (for arm rests) and connected to the rounded seat outlined by a similar pipe as the chair legs. It was obviously painted metallic, but it wasn't overly shiny like iron or aluminum. The actual seat of the chair also had a mesh texture made up of hundreds of tiny eyelets. From my perspective these eyelets appeared to shift in size where the curves of the chair rounded and warped. Although the chair was in the shade, each eyelet had a tiny reflective spot of specular light at the bottom. The color of the chair in these shaded areas was a cooler grey, on the blue side. Because it was in the shade, there was no stark shadow of the meshes but there was a slight indication of the leg cast shadows that diffused immediately into the shade of the area. As time passes, the spot of light disappears for a couple of minutes, but returns by the end of my observation (however, it has shifted slightly towards the direction of the base of the seat).

Here is the video I took. Again, the camera is overwhelmed by the light, and I need to figure out a way to get my camera to handle this!

Metal Chair from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Early Afternoon Plant

So, I have returned to a subject from a previous post, but at a different time. The last time I looked at this plant (in entry 3) it was after dusk. This time, I make my observations at about noon on a quite cloudy day. These are fluffy white clouds, but they do not darken the sky or block out the sun. The sky is clear blue only with a whole bunch of clouds. In this light some things I had not noticed in the darker conditions. In the sunlight, the plant leaves are more apparently translucent than they were in the dark, and the undersides looked more yellow green. I can also see more little details, such as tiny bugs crawling on the leaves and flying around lazily. This is the same plant, located under the same tree as before, but in the sunlight the shade of the leaves is more obvious. When I begin my observation the cast shadow of the tree is very strong. The shadows sway gently in the mostly still wind. As time passes, the shadow softens out, I imagine because a cloud crosses the sun and diffuses the light. The specular reflections on the leaves reveal the texture to be somewhat waxy, but are less shiny in the diffused light. By the end of the observation, the clouds must have moved out of the sun's way because the tree's cast shadows are sharp again.

My camera seems to have been overwhelmed by the amount of light, so it looks a little overexposed. I still need to play around more with its settings so I can more accurately record light in this kind of condition.

Early Afternoon Plant from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Palm Tree

I began my observation in the mid-late afternoon at around 5 pm.  The sky was mostly clear, but there were a couple of clouds in the sky.  My subject was a small palm tree I found in my apartment complex.  It wasn't around any other palm trees, but it was around some shrubs and the height of the apartment buildings offered some shade.  The color of the palm leaves were a mix of greens that was cool on one side (bluer greens) and warm on the other (yellower greens) where the sun was hitting it directly.  Weirdly, the leaves on the cooler side had a lot more white, specular reflection than those on the warm side, and the light seemed more diffused.  The undersides of the leaves looked more yellowy, probably because of green light of the topside from the layer of of leaves below bouncing back up.  There are no sharp shadows anywhere, but the trunk did cast a pretty distinct shadow.  Although the wind was basically still when I began my observation, the wind made the leaves wiggle a lot in the middle of my observation, and so the soft shadows of the leaves gently shifted (which only really affected the other leaves, as there were no real dark shadows cast by the leaves).  By the end everything looked cooler.  I think the movement of the clouds caused the subtle shift in light intensity.  The light from the sun no longer hit the one angle so directly because it was diffused by clouds.  It wasn't until around the end that I noticed the sun was reflecting intensely from a window across the street, causing reflections on the cooler leaves.

I had a little technical difficulty which made me wait a couple of extra minutes before I could take the second video, but I wasn't too late for the light quality to have changed too much.

 

Palm Tree from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

 

Rainy Afternoon

It has been raining all day! A different lighting situation to say the least. I haven't made any observations in the early afternoon, either, so I decide to whip out the old camera and concentrate on my umbrella from a dry spot. Although the skies are grey, the light is fairly bright. Everything is bathed in a soft, white glow as the rain falls. I set my umbrella down at my feet, looking at it from the shelter of a covered bench area. While the light in the sky is bright, my subject is in the shade. Let me begin by describing my umbrella, which is of the collapsable/portable variety. The texture of the umbrella fabric is resilient enough sustain itself against water, but not entirely opaque so that light cannot pas through it. It is primarily red, with a colorful paisley and floral pattern of yellows, greens and blues. The handle is a shiny grey cylinder with a pink, inset pushbutton, with a rope-like pink loop for the wrist hanging of the edge. Since I plan to use it within the next 15 minutes, I did not bother to wrap it up, so it lies open. Since it has been raining, the colors seem to pop a little more than usual on the wet fabric, but the soft, intense brightness of the afternoon somewhat washes out the color where light directly hits. The fabric is not shiny by any means, as a subtle texture (which is more for tactile than appearance) captures the light in ways that make it appear more matte. However, the rain has rendered a slight slick quality which bounes some light back as a soft specular. The material blows open a little bit every so often with the rough winds, revealing the slight transparency as light diffuses from the topside of the material through the slightly lighter in hue underside. The overall white light of the afternoon and rain makes for subtle, soft shadows if any. There is certainly no apparent cast shadow, and shadows can really only be found at the folds of the fabric over the bends in metallic structure. Over the 15 minutes little of this changes.

Here is my video (excuse the chatter at the beginning, I was finishing a conversation with my professor as I got myself situated for this). Upon watching my footage, I realize that I did not pay much attention to the metallic wireframe of my object while I was making my observations. In the footage it stands out, but I seemed to be very focused on the umbrella fabric. Next time I will be more careful to take note of the whole picture.

Rainy Afternoon from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Nighttime Nature

I make my observations at night, just at the end of sunset.  I watch my subject, a small plant on the ground, from a bench in the park area by my apartment.    This little plant is situated between a couple of larger ones, all under the shade of a tree.  It is quite dark, but the illumination of street lamps around the park in conjunction with what is left of the sun give off enough light for me to see a little deep green color on the mostly silhouetted leaves.  The leaves appear to be have an extremely smooth and shiny texture as they reflect quite a bit of specular light, however I can also make out tiny ridges that run along the surfaces of each leaf.  The cast shadows are long and sharp, lengthening slowly towards me over the course of the 15 minutes. At first the air is still, so the shadows are static, but as my observation period ends a gentle wind blows, and the swaying nearby plants make a subtle motion with the shadows on my subject.  The 15 minutes are just aout through and the main difference is the darker quality of my scene.  The sun is gone, and all that is left is the artificial light of the area lamps.    My camera captures little but darkness and a few spots of specular light from the leaves.

 

 

Nighttime Nature from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.

Streets at Sunset

It is about 6:45 in the afternoon. I just got out of my class in the College of Communications building, and the 1L/1M bus I was meant to be on passes our stop because it is too full. Shame. I turn the unfortunate circumstances around and make the extra 20 or so minutes I will be sitting at this spot productive, noticing the peculiar way the pebbles of the sidewalk here at Guadalupe and Dean Keeton interact with the sun.

Without paying too close attention, it would be easy to dismiss the sidewalk as a plain, if only slightly textured grey. This is actually not the case upon further inspection, because each pebble seems to be a different color sitting in the grey cement. I witness greyish greens, pinks, blues, and burgundies. The texture alternates between the rough, gritty cement grooves and the smooth, shiny pebbles. They are not particularly luminous stones, as they don't reflect their respective colors. They are also only so shiny because their specular spots disappear in the slightest shadow of a passing car or pedestrian. As for the hour and season (that of dusk and late summer), the sunlight seems to be golden or orange and so the sidewalk appears to have a slight hue of orange. A subtle shadow from the buildings across the street at the drag creeps in over the 15 minutes. It is almost impossible to notice, but I recall the tip of the shadow kissing the curb when I began my observation and at the end it seems to be kissing my feet. This shadow is not enough to rid the pebbles of their shine, but enough cars and passerbys make it more and more difficult to make out those glints. As the 15 minutes end, the shadow from the drag has changed the color quality of the street from a dirty orange to a more blue/purple/periwinkle grey. The once clearly differently hued pebbles now appear to be nearly identical in color.

An oddity I didn't pick up on until I just about finished my observation was the dramatic disparity between my eyes' perception of the sidewalk versus what my camera picked up. Of course the lens and aperture had an affect on this, but normally the video mode of my camera records light more accurately. This confused me until I remembered that the entire time I was staring at the sidewalk, I did so through the filter of my sunglass lenses, which are black but still skew the color towards a browner, more sepia color-tone. For the last couple of seconds of footage I hastily pull what was filtering light in my own eyes over the eye of my camera. Perhaps not entirely accurate, but certainly closer to what I actually saw.

Here is my video. Forgive the shakeyness of my camera. Although I hope to work in film, I make no claims at being a cinematographer.

Streets at Sunset from Lady Subrosa on Vimeo.