Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Light to a photographer is what paint is to a painter, or a block of clay, wood or marble are to a sculptor. That's why you hear photographers and film makers waxing eloquently about particular types of light as other artists do about the raw materials of their craft. One of the most desirable types of light for many photographers is the natural light that occurs during "The Golden Hour", that is to say, the hour(s) just after dawn and before dusk.  

The long, seductive shadows
of golden hour light

It is at those times when the light from the sun, low in the sky, casts long, dramatic shadows. Filtered through more of the earth's atmosphere than at any other time of day, the quality of the light is relatively low in contrast and provides a warm cast which is especially flattering for portraits. But really everything looks beautiful in golden hour light which is why it's not surprising that many photographers make their images exclusively early in the morning and/or late in the afternoon.

The antithesis of the golden hour is the light found on a cloudless day at noon, particularly around the Summer Solstice when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. From the high angle the sun's light passes through the minimum amount of atmosphere, resulting in high contrast, bluish light. That trifecta of qualities can be a deadly combination. It's unforgiving light that in the wrong hands, can make anything look terrible. 

Which is why to paraphrase Noel Coward, unlike mad dogs and Englishmen, most photographers seldom go out in the midday sun.

But the truth is, while certain types of light are not appropriate for certain situations, there is no such thing as bad light.

I first discovered the magic of high noon summertime light about thirty years ago during a partial solar eclipse. In order to safely observe the rare celestial event, I came prepared with a simple device consisting of a shoe box with a tiny hole poked into one of its sides. This simplest of cameras commonly known as a pinhole camera, works on exactly the same principle as other cameras, just without the fuss of a lens.

In a nutshell, here's how it works:

The very act of seeing and image making are based upon a very simple principle, the fact that bright objects reflect more light than dark objects. Now imagine deconstructing the scene in front of a camera into a grid of tiny squares, each square reflecting a different value of light (and color). Light reflects in all directions from our squares, but as the pinhole is so small, only a tiny portion of light reflected from any one of our image squares will find its way into our pinhole aperture, Once it passes though the aperture, that ray of light then follows a straight line until it hits the back of our shoe box camera, resulting in a tiny speck of light. The more light reflected by our square, the brighter the light speck.

As the light reflected off each image square hits our aperture at a slightly different angle, the light entering into the camera will deposit itself on a different part of the camera back, Now take the light from all those little squares, each one carrying with it the reflectance value of its source and depositing itself faithfully within its unique set of coordinates upon a new grid of points of light on the camera back and VOILA(!), we have projected upon the back of our box camera, a two dimensional image representing the scene in front of the camera.

Now unless we were able to climb into our shoe box camera and close off all outside light except the light entering through the pinhole, it's very difficult to view the image of  most subjects with the naked eye as the pinhole only permits a small amount of light to pass through. Unless that is, the subject happens to be a very bright object, such as the sun.

The problem with the shoe box/pinhole/eclipse viewer is that you have to hold it very precisely and very still in order for the image of the sun to be easily visible on the back of the viewer. Not to mention that you look silly holding a shoe box over your head. 

In no time I chucked my homemade device because I discovered that nature provided a much more efficient pinhole eclipse viewer, the leaves of trees.

We've all seen the shadows of leaves cast by the sun. When leaves are dispersed and enough light passes between them, their shadows are distinct. However when a tree is densely packed with broad leaves such as those found on maple trees, only a small amount of direct sunlight if any passes though, and these tiny holes that allow light to pass work exactly as pinhole apertures. So rather than shadows cast on the ground, what we see in the photograph on the right are live images of the disc of the sun, one for each "pinhole" opening in the leaves. 

During normal times these discs of light on the ground may be mistaken for shadows, but during a solar eclipse, the image of the sun being blocked by the moon is unmistakable, as rather than a disk what we see are crescents of light, the shape of which determined by the amount of sun covered by the moon. In the extremely rare event of a total eclipse, the crescent for a brief moment becomes the familiar ring of light that is the sun's corona we've all seen in photographs of eclipses but few (myself included) have ever seen in person.

It was a discovery for me that day as while I understood the concept of the pinhole, I never thought of it in that particular context. As I was in a public park at the time, I shared my "discovery" with passersby who cared to notice. 

A few years ago during another solar eclipse, once again around noon in the same park and the same time of year, I tried to repeat the experience. Alas, it was a hazy day and while the sun was still visible through the thin cloud cover and still possible to view the eclipse by other means, the stark contrast between the sun and the rest of the sky wasn't enough to produce the pinhole effect through the trees. 

So the recipe for the leaf pinhole effect is a cloudless sky to provide sufficient contrast to be able to see the image, and the sun being high in the sky to produce nearly circular (rather than elongated) images of the sun. In other words, the dreaded summer solstice noon light.

A few weeks ago while walking home from the grocery store, again around noon, near the summer solstice, I became enchanted by these images of the sun as pictured in the second photograph, dancing around the sidewalk due to the wind blowing about the leaves and their "pinhole" apertures.

Since then I haven't stopped looking down, observing and photographing the wonderful array of images produced by nature upon the human made canvas of the sidewalk, during what I once considered the worst light of the day.

And as of a few weeks ago, I've joined ranks with the mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun.