George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, the company that popularised photography once said:

“Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.”

It was a little under half way through my photographic career that I came to realise how accurate this statement was. A knowledge of light is fundamental to our understanding of photography but it goes beyond that. Light isn’t just a physical property of transmission, reflection or refraction, it is also an ‘emotion’ and by that I mean it induces emotion in a similar way to music.

How does it do this? Well part of it is imprinting, in that we become familiar through culture to certain styles or moods that light conveys and part of it is actual science in that the human brain is pre-programmed to perceive visual stimuli in a certain ways for survival reasons.