I just got a set of photographs and a DVD from Color Codes: a point of hue, a dance piece I lit this past summer. The photographs are beautiful. But there are a lot and it will take a while to get through all of them to post anything. I am actually surprised that the pictures turned out as well as they did given that the piece was both very dark and high contrast. That is the overall light levels were dim and within that dimness there was a lot of shadow.
My sole complaint is that the color is off. They are not properly white balanced. The color range for the piece was very tight. All versions of “white light” using only color correction to keep the palette between incandescent and daylight colors.
In the pictures the nuance is lost and everything looks a lot more amber than it was live. But so goes it. Looking over the lighting for that piece it was interesting to see some of the choices I had made. The entire dance was about color, but instead of having the lighting play into that, we set the lighting against the piece and created shifting geometric forms out of white light. I remember being very pleased with the lighting and the pictures do show a wonderful visual coherence that is achieved by having the light step aside and play a different role than the narrative of the work itself.
In other points of interest I have discovered a plethora of creative commons distributed minimal techno record labels and that has made me very pleased. And my computer’s hard drive very full.
Tags: color codes, dance, photographs, white balance
