Shaping Light

Here are 3 of my best pics from the “Bounced Color” exercise. My iPhone had difficulty picking up the color that bouncing onto the walls and floor. I used a sheet of frosted acrylic as a diffuser to help with the lighting source issue I was also facing.

Here, like the original pics, a diffuser was used and an Ottlite to give a more even distribution of light. You can see that the space gets “warmer” when the light is hovering over the left and right sides, and “cooler” when it is in the middle.

This one is using no diffuser, but rather a roof with a 15% opening. I used a flashlight for this demonstration and tried to more accurately mimic the sun’s path through the day. The color rods are noticeably more effective with color bouncing upwards off of them.

So, in the early part of the day, the sun’s position would give the room a warmer feel. When the sun has reached its peak, the room is cooler looking. And then as the day comes to a close, the room seems to warm up again.

For this, I just put the display on its back and tested what would happen if light came from behind the color rods and through the diffuser. It’s an interesting “scan” effect that does achieve some bounced color.

This is a draft video for the project on changing light. Adria and I are working together for this video and are combining two of our projects together. My patterned openings from my last two projects are being overlaid with the transparent colored plastic from Adria’s bounced color project. We aim to have different color groups in different parts of the roof opening so that throughout the day, the colors will be different.

After taking this video, we learned that the camera continually tries to refocus because of the changing light levels. We either need to change the camera focus options, or we need to use a different camera.

The light box from the last project was reused for this experiment. First, I laser cut patterns into both blue and red matteboard. Then, I used these screens along with color floor pieces to reflect color onto the back wall of the light box. There was a visible difference in the color of the wall behind the screen but none of my cameras could really pick it up. Since we could visually see the effect in class, I am including several process pictures and an attempt at catching the effect in a video. The red board was most “visible” so I used included images and video from the red experiments. 

This short video clip shows how light could change throughout the day using one of my panels I created in the first week of class.

When experimenting with color I wanted to use my initial interest in how color could bounce and wash a surface. As I felt my curvilinear panel was the most successful from last weeks experiment,  I glued sections of orange, blue, and green construction paper to the back of each strip.  Although it is hard to tell from the photographs, I found that orange seemed bounce and wash the surface the best, while green seemed to be the least successful of the three. Although orange washed the surface the best, I found that the colors did not show up on the surfaces as well as I would have liked.

In my next step, I would like to try bright colors of construction paper as in Tuesday’s class we experimented with different colors of paper and their brightness. When examining the different colors bright, florescent papers seemed to work the best when bouncing color versus the dark colors I used in my experiment.

The first two images are instances of bounced color I found out and about.  It is a glass vase with a light pointing down through it.  The colors from the vase are bounced off the ground plane to create interesting “bubbles” of color.  What I found most interesting about these images, is the affect the water at the bottom of the vase has on the appearance of the colors

I wanted to investigate light and shadow in relation to translucent and transparent materials. The  first investigation was of vellum with slits cut into it to allow light through.  My hope was that the vellum would allow a little bit of light through and the slits would allow a lot of light through the screen.  It turned out to be more contrast between the slits and the solid screen than I anticipated.

The second experiment was more successful towards what I was interested in investigating.  I wove strips of clear acetate together and painted some of the intersections.  this created an interesting shadow on the wall where there was maximum light being let through the voids and where there was a slight filter where strips of acetate overlapped.  What I found most interesting about this was how 3 dimensional the image on the wall appears to be.

I set up a white room with light bouncing off a diagonal wall into the room and then changed the color of the diagonal wall with construction paper.  The first image is a white wall, then the color parade starts.  Can you see them all?

White.               Orange.             Blue.                  Green.               Purple.             Yellow.

I started with a laser cut panel and explored various lighting conditions, including backlighting through translucent paper, before moving onto a printed tree pattern, and finally layering the two.

Here I played with motion of the light source.

light and shadow assignment 1

My experiments from the first day of class inspired me to continue experimentation with patterned light and shadows.  I decided to use circles, squares, triangles, and an arabesque pattern. The movement of the sun during the day is amplified by the movement of shadows across the walls and floor.