Louis Daguerre

Today I am going to thank James Gurney for posting this piece on his blog. I am not familiar with this artist, however, this piece is a fantastic example of the topics that I have been looking into, specifically how light affects objects and how color temperature affects an image. In this image by Louis Daguerre, we see a number of architetural elements illuminated by moonlight (presumably based on the name of the piece.) There are some drastic differences in how light is affecting the different planes based on there orientation to the light source. Let's look at the division that occurs nearly straight down the center of the piece. Everything on the left of ceneter is being directly illuminated by the moonlight. Everything to the right of center is being indirectly lit from either moonlight bleeding around the edge of the planes and filling the shadow side with light, or it is being lit by reflected light bouncing off of other planes in the piece. The differences in how the light is affecting these areas is extraordinary. The directly lighted planes show colors that are more saturated and shadows that are deeper and darker in spots. The deatils are sharper with harder edges and greater ranges of value and color are observed. The indirectly lit area shows desaturate areas of color and the values of the shadows are much higher than in some of the lighted areas. The areas illuminated with reflected light from the ground or nearby wall surfaces show brighter values and a local color in the reflected light. There is a marked lack of detail in these areas and the edges are much softer. This image provides me with alot of information that I will use on the current painting I am working on which the lighting is on figures but direction of the light source and positioning of objects are similar.