Serendipity

Many people are wedded to their mobile phones, probably more firmly than they are to their partners. If they ring, they have to answer them; wherever they are, they have to be switched on. As is often the case with gadgets, they take over their lives. One simple maxim is forgotten; the phone is our slave, not our master. Very little in life is so urgent that it must be addressed straight away. We managed for hundreds of years without being constantly in touch so why must we be so now? Let fly a letter, post a postcard, signal some semaphore, and just give the irritating little contraptions a rest.

Hang on; I’ve just received a text. Back in a mo.

It’s OK, no one was disturbed. I keep my phone on vibrate.

Now this is obviously a week for thinking about what I do for a living. Perhaps spending endless hours sat in a warm, airless box is concentrating the mind. I like today’s image because of the lighting. Strong, low, evening sunlight is sweeping in from left of centre, caressing and warming the palm of the woman’s hand, cupping the rays and reflecting them back onto her face. She is oblivious to this, intent on her conversation with a distant friend. Sound, light, heat, all brought together by this modern act of communication.

Often, when lighting a production, it is these little serendipitous tricks of the light that lift the action from the mundane to the sublime. On location near Liverpool I lit a night scene for a play in which a tall, heavily set man approached a woman lying on the ground. He was silhouetted, his face in deep shadow; she lay, weeping, in the pool of light I had provided, his shadow passing over her. As he picked the woman up, her coat inadvertently fell open. The light, streaming in over his head, reflected back off her white blouse and slowly revealed his face. Absolute perfection and totally unplanned; it was all done with a solitary lamp and the others I had ready to light him with were never switched on (I hasten to add that the production still got charged for them – mustn’t make the job too cheap).

It was a cracking piece of lighting for which I could really take no credit. The laws of physics and greatly improved camera technology had won through. (Obviously I’m not daft. When the director complimented me on the look of the scene, it was all down to me. It was design, mate, not accident; never pass up credit). Simplicity and lighting go hand in hand; why try and control the spread, direction, position and intensity of several lights when you can do it with one. It means a lot less setting up and a lot more eating and drinking time (and flirting with the make-up ladies, if that’s your thing).