I saw something yesterday that I had seen many times before–a large stack of photographs taken by architecture professor Bud Morehead–and I realized with a start that part of their meaning had evaded me until just that moment.
He was looking at the shadows, not just the buildings, trying to capture their movement across the face of other buildings. You can see it best here (these photos were nowhere near each other in the stack, by the way):
Here’s another that I especially liked:
After a bit of thought I remembered a photo that I took in the winter of 2011. The winter light in the quad can be bewitching and hard to catch with a camera. I was pretty happy with this one although I never had any reason to use it. Now I do:
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man? The shadows know.
Learning to pay attention to light is a key skill in photography and architecture. I remember hearing about some exercises on that in archi classes.
When I was at Rice, CAM had a show of Ansel Adams photos. There were five photos of Yosemite Valley hung side by side. Each one was the same view, but totally different because of the light. It was like Monet and the Rouen Cathedral.
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