Janet has been hospitalized twice recently. I posted a photograph taken during her most recent hospitalization of the cafeteria in the hospital. The cafeteria is very colorfully done in something close to pale orange, lime green, a very pure red and blends of two or three of those colors, strange combination but it works without referencing Christmas. The photograph I took was through one of the cafeteria’s glass walls. Inside it is lit with incandescent and on the outside daylight is flowing in from the right from the large windows on the front of the building.
I had made a comment on the photograph that I loved working with mixed light, especially incandescent and daylight. A friend, Bekkie Harper, had commented that she loved what I did in mixed light situations and asked how on earth I did it. You know something, I never gave it much thought. I know that I like working with mixed light but I had never really considered why—that is just the way I am. I don’t question myself. I simply do and accept. So Bekkie’s question forced me to think about things I do not normally think about and I would like to share my answer.
“Bekkie, I have a simple approach. Find area of mixed lighting, point camera, press shutter—but the real secret is in not having some hang up about “true” color. As you may have noticed from my photographs of Janet, sometimes she’s orange, sometimes green, sometime pale and sometimes very saturated. Color is an emotional component of a photograph and worrying about true color is in essence an attempt at documentation not creativity. If digital sensors functioned differently my photographs would look different from what they do but still different from reality. It is the same as choosing a flat, a round or even a fan brush to apply paint to a canvas, each has its own unique characteristic as does digital sensors the tool that photographer use to create photographs. It can be seen from two different perspectives—simple laziness for doing corrections or as accepting and making the best of the tools available and most likely a combination of the two.
I do have a preference for using the incandescent white balance in these situations and then in post to warm the incandescent and cool the daylight even more—contrast is the heart of photography and I love emphasizing the contrast between warm and cool, even over emphasizing it.
I am not sure just what the push for replacing incandescent with fluorescent is going to have on the color of many of my photographs or which direction I will prefer to go when that is more prevalent. Maybe my world will change from warm/cool to green/magenta—whatever, I can assure you there will be many times when I will do as I do and let the tools that I have make their contribution to the finished results in my photographs.”
Of course, the correct answer to Bekkie’s question is simply—color is an emotional component in a photograph and I want to take full advantage of that component so that the photograph will be about what I photographed. Remember the photograph is not the object photographed. In this particular photograph I am photographing the color of light and the emotional impact of the contrast between warm and cool light as much as I am photographing the actual cafeteria.
When taken on a whole, a person with astute psychological perception will be aware that what I am photographing has nothing at all to do with the object photographed. They would notice that I frequently play warm interior against cold exterior or hint of cold exterior as the interior always dominates—how else would a recluse play it? Warm, comfortable, safe, enclosing; cool, distant, blinding, disconnected. It is my reclusive haven against the cruel outside—has nothing to do with cafeterias or glass walls or red sofas. Of course, it would require viewing more than one of my mixed light photographs and probably knowing a little about me to understand that.
For the first half century of my involvement in photography I shot film and in reading back my answer to Bekkie I tried to remember how I would have handled this same situation with film. Back then “true color” wasn’t so much a “hang up” as I see it to be now with the versatility of ISO and white balance that we have been given in digital. It was more an either/or situation, much more creatively limiting. Like most photographers I was very concerned about using the proper film/light balance (we didn’t even know the term white balance back then) for the situation. I do not recall doing much with mixed lighting as I tried to eliminate all but the correct lighting to match the balance, either daylight or tungsten, of the film I was using. When I did not correctly balance the film with the lighting the off color images were considerably disappointing—i.e. really, really bad. It seemed pretty ingrained that the two should match. Digital has given the photographer considerable freedom that was only available on a very limited degree with film. I do not even recall attempting to exercise that limited degree when shooting film. Not only does the photographer now have almost infinitely adjustable degrees of ISO and white balance, they also have post processing where the colors can be further manipulated, enhanced, emotionalized. Now that I think about it, what I would give to be able to redo that first century with a digital camera!
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