welcome
This website on light, colour, perception and photography brings together a collection of notes and essays I have been intending to publish for some time. Much of the content relates to a series of lectures on the theme of light & colour.
These lectures were given to various photographic societies and clubs in the West Midlands. The aim was to provide an insight into how we see the world and to show how the interplay of light, colour and form is a creative, dynamic process in which art and science each have something to say. With photographers being the audience the lectures were geared to their specific needs but the underlying principles shared the same research.
light, colour & perception
To the extent that the external world can be understood through physics and chemistry that same world also teaches just as much about ourselves, how we perceive and conceive the world. The physiology of our senses, the visual processes and the act of cognition are just a few of the elements along the road from percept to concept. The subject of how we come to understand the world in which we live is a fascinating one. It continues to engage my attention and interest to this day.
The theme of light & colour is of interest to scientists and artists, to technologists in the manufacturing industries and to ourselves as consumers of those products. Colour helps shape our lives as we shape the world of colour around us. But the real interest is not just in how we use colour or relate to different colours but how we perceive colours. There are those that believe that colour is an artefact, something that is created entirely within the brain; to others, colour is "out there" in the world: "the colour is where you see it".
This website aims to show which of these two points of view is correct. Be assured: one of them is most definitely wrong. The approach taken by this website will be to build, bit by bit, our understanding of the world of light & colour, how we perceive it. We will start with the basics and build on those foundations.
colour, colour space, light, darkness and optics
Light & colour are just a few of the topics covered in this website. We start by exploring the most simple dynamic: the light-dark polarity and the attendant concepts of black, white and grey. To this polarity we add another dimension: that of colour. With all three dimensions we arrive at the notion of a world of colour that can be represented as colour models in 3-D space.
With our firmly-established grounding in the concepts of light & colour we explore some of the visual processes including the coloured shadows, so-called optical illusions as well as the colours produced in turbid media. We extend our research into optics to include the concepts of reflectance and reflectivity. Finally we take a look at spectra and use the results of those investigations to reconsider Newton's notion that "white light is comprised of all the colours".
photography
Photography has been one of my four great pleasures in life. It has helped me remember what otherwise would have been lost. It has helped me look at the world more closely, ask questions and see things in a different way. Photography is one of the main themes running through this site and, amongst the many technical illustrations, you will also find galleries of my own work.
The reason for giving photography its own section is that nowadays almost everyone has a camera. The world has never been so well recorded and yet so little perceived. To the extent we capture endless images of the world we stand apart from it but we have become a race of lookers-on rather than observers. Our participation in the visual process of perception is shallow: we skim the wave crests and never feel the deep swell of the ocean below.
If nothing else I hope that this website will help you perceive the world more closely, more carefully. Perception, in this case visual perception, lies at the heart of our understanding. What can be done for the sense of sight could equally have been done for our sense of hearing - but that is a task for someone else. The content must stand on its own merit. It is not there for you simply to accept or blindly reject; it is there for you to think about and to draw your own conclusions.