Chapter 7: Natural Light Exposures

There’s a charming 1970s movie called The Owl and the Pussycat that stars George Segal and Barbra Streisand as a pair of misfit New Yorkers whose worlds unexpectedly collide. Segal’s character is a wannabe writer named Felix and during the course of the film, Streisand’s character (a down-and-out part-time hooker) comes across one of his unpublished manuscripts where he uses the phrase “The sun spit morning into Julian’s face.” Streisand’s character (Doris) launches into a tirade of literary (not to mention personal) criticism and demands that he explain how the sun can spit morning. She is aghast and perplexed by his choice of verbs. It’s a very funny scene.

The truth is, though, the sun does spit — and it licks and it kisses, it carves and caresses and soothes, and it colors and obscures and adorns. The sun’s light illuminates and embellishes the shapes and textures and forms of the world around you in myriad different ways, some so subtle you barely notice them until you see and study them in photographs, others so bold the results are too harsh to even look at. The sun, of course, not only provides the light that you see by (without it you would inhabit a very cold and dark blob without a solar system to call home), but it is also the master painter of everything you see. Capturing the many moods of natural light (see 7-1) requires that you be able to anticipate when the most beautiful and ....