I have a lot of sunlight that comes through my apartment so I figured I would go to a couple windows throughout the place and see where the light reflects! This is the window in the spare bed room.As you can see the light reflects off of the dresser in the corner of the room an makes a some what out of focus line diagnaly.
The next window source of light comes from my living room. I have curtains up so very little amount of light comes through but when it does it comes through is a unique kind of way.The light comes from the side an this is the type of reflection that it leaves on the wall across from it…

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For my quotes project I created a lighting fixture to act as a search light on my watch tower. But while playing with the ideas I ran into some issues with brightness and focusing.

Here are the LEDs in the light. I felt like I needed two of them because one wasn’t bright enough with the lights in the lab on. I used a paper towel tube to help keep the beam of light contained and not spread out.

The problem with having two light sources is you get two defined beams of light with a bright spot in the middle. I was looking to create a more unified beam of light instead of two separate beams. I thought maybe a way to make them look like one beam was to make some sort reflector.

I put a piece of tin foil inside my paper towel tube hoping that it would create a more unified look but instead it reflected the lights everywhere. When I was putting the foil in the tube it got crinkled and because of that the light reflected everywhere and didn’t get contained in the tube. It also didn’t unify my beams of light.

I actually ended up kind of liking seeing the two beams of light and ditched the tin foil for a more clean look. If I were to do this again i would probably use four LEDs evenly spaced to minimize seeing the different beams. It would be more unified and be brighter.

This week I tried lighting water in a bottle to see how it reflected light! I used my LED light box and a standard water bottle to see what effects I could make!

This was my first attempt at shining the light through the water bottle. I had the bottle parallel to the LEDs so that it was sideways. I then moved the bottle down a little bit so that the refection was cast on the bottom of the light box. Although the picture didn’t turn out as beautiful as real life we can still see how the water interacts with the light. We see areas that are bright and some that are dark. It’s almost like a gobo in a way because of how it breaks up the surface of the light box. Also if the bottle wasn’t as full we could make the reflected light have the movement of water by moving it back and forth.

I then put the water bottle down and saw this very interesting reflection on the bottom of the box. But then this raised a question in my mind as to whether the water in the bottle creates these effects or the shape of the bottle itself. It’s probably a little bit of both but I don’t have any other types of clear bottles to try. I wonder if the water soaks in the light and the bottle focuses into shapes like this. It reminds me of a prism separating light. And to me is almost a little creepy like these fingers of light are going to grab you!

Normally I feel like making a rainbow stage look that actually looks nice would be difficult, but I think this turned out really cool. The back curtain is rainbow colored, so I’m not 100% sure what color(s) they used to light it.

I went to a concert at The Rave this week and I may have spent half of it looking at the cool shadows on the ceiling…

This first picture is of a photo shoot I did with my little brother. I really liked how the side light hit the side of my face and left the other side dark and mysterious.

This is a picture of when I went to the studio over the weekend. As you can see the back light behind the computer is giving the room a nice purple glow!

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This week my roommate, Eric, designed a set for A Raisin in the Sun for class. After he was done we decided to throw it into my LED light box and took some pictures!

Here’s what it looked like under more yellow lighting conditions. We probably spent a good hour throwing every different color of light we could create on the model. But beyond that I was wondering how it would look with just back lighting and side lighting.

This is with just side lighting with three LEDs. It’s very ominous and to me looks like it’s moon light coming from a window. I really love how the shadows of the chairs bring you right to the white appliances in the house. And I keep getting draw to the little bit of white light on the person on the left.

In this picture the model is being lit up with three LEDs in the back. To me this one isn’t creepy but instead feels more like it’s night time with the moon reflecting light into the house. What’s interesting is because of the angle of the light some of it looks like it’s coming through the window and the rest of it is coming over the top. The shadows on the ground are both from the furniture and from the pieces of overhead architecture off the back wall.

What’s really fun about my first semester here is that I’m only taking theatre and art classes. Because of that a lot of the ideas in my drawing class also apply to this class and my design process. There’s ideas that we discuss in my drawing class that once I start seeing I can never not see it in objects. A big one for me is the terminator edge on objects that are lit up with one light source.

A terminator edge is the light between the half-tone and the darkest part of the object. Basically the line in-between the light side of the fire hydrant and the dark side. When side lighting a cylindrical object, the terminator edge is generally in the middle. But because the fire hydrant is a more advanced shape the terminator edge gets all wonky. To me when you’re playing with shadows like this it gives the objects a lot more character and visual interest.

Becca Bollinger

I have this mask in my room and I happened to have my desk lamp on over it and I moved it into a better position for the photo placing it under some top light.

I believe you can count this as top light, but this is the suns light shinning down on some beautiful tires that I painted this past week!

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Lets try that again… with pictures.

In the third ward a few weeks ago I found this logo outside some shop that was lit with what looked like a source 4 with something controlling the motion of it rotating.

In the third ward a few weeks ago I found this logo outside some shop that was lit with what looked like a source 4 with something controlling the motion of it rotating.

I did some experimenting in the kitchen this weekend and this was a picture I took of these wonderful Philly cheesesteak egg rolls!

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Based on what I was thinking about earlier I decided I wanted to see if I could create true toplight. I noticed earlier that a lot of the light in my room was getting bounced around and that gave the appearance that the objects were lit all around them.

I borrowed this destroyed wall section piece from my roommate and put it under toplight with a standard desk lamp with a day glow bulb. We do see some dark shadows under some of the rocks but in general the object looks to be more dimensional then intended. We can see the sides of the object really well.

With this picture I turned on some LEDs in my light box right above the object. This to me looks a lot closer to top light and makes the object look much more dramatic. But we can still see that even though the light box is black the light is getting reflected around it.

This time I tried it with my LED PAR lamp. This focused the light right on the object and give is a very dramatic look. We can also see that not much of the light bounced around the light box and it stayed on the object. But to me at least the sides look a lot more lit up then I would hope but I think that could be part of the material used with the object as well as the color.

I think the LED PAR light was probably the closest to how I would imagine only toplight would look. We don’t generally live our lives in complete top light conditions so it was interested to see how it worked with the object and lights that I had.

Thanks,
Nicholas Johnson

I noticed something today that probably to many of you is obvious but we’re hardly ever in true top light conditions. There is, especially in buildings, always fill light from other directions.

This is the light in my room. It has a standard day glow bulb and it illuminates my room quite nicely. But objects under these lighting conditions aren’t just lit up on the top.

I took a picture of this bottle directly under the light. We can see within it that there is a nice streak of light in the center of the bottle but the sides of the bottle aren’t completely dark. Now since this is a clear bottle the light interacts with it differently then a more solid object but everything in my room still has dimension. It doesn’t look like its just lit with top light. This is because my room has white walls and the light gets reflected all through out my room. The walls help fill in the light that the top light can’t reach therefore giving my objects dimension. I’ve been in rooms that have darker walls and sometimes you need more then one light to be able to clearly see objects because the dark walls absorb more of the light.

Thanks,
Nicholas Johnson

There was a random abandoned shoe sitting in Spaights Plaza, directly under the street lamp. Very ominous placement and lighting.

The “Christmas lights” that we have above our couch give off a subtle white warm light that lights at different angles along our wall

Becca Bollinger

Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone

Messing around with different colors in my house, and just like in plays and setting you can feel different vibes from the colors. The red gives me an intense, intimate and heart pound type of feeling. And the blue lighting is a lot more calm, and warming ironically.

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