Photography is all about light. The word itself means, literally, light-writing. Whether the capture medium is film or an electronic sensor, every photograph results from photons striking a light-sensitive surface which reacts chemically or electrically to them as they arrive.

Photographers, like painters, have a palette from which to work. An oil painter may have raw umber, sap green, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson and titanium white on their palette. A photographer’s palette stretches into infinity and includes colors and tones that change with the location, season of the year, and time of the day. Those can be limitations, but simultaneously presents a challenge to learn and utilize the nuances of light before us to awaken a response in you, the observer. An infinite variety of light infuses the natural world, forming a vast playground of visual, emotional, and intellectual delight.

I have been thinking about light for years and the germ of the idea that led to this exhibition began to develop more than a year ago while I was immersed in the incredible light found in Tuscany. My self-assignment became the enumeration of as many of the differing qualities of light as I could, finding accompanying examples from my files and creating new work to fill gaps or to improve upon previous endeavors.

Since I work almost exclusively out of doors, my work is imbued with themes seasonal, locational, or temporal in nature. The light in winter is not the same as the light in spring, the light in Tuscany is vastly different from the light in Colorado, and dawn’s light is very unlike the light at noon. The image of a given subject created under cloudy, diffused light carries vastly different emotional and pictorial content than the same subject under bright sunlight, or under the light of the full moon, for that matter.

All the possible permutations quickly led to the realization that I had on my hands a project far larger than I could present in limited gallery space, and so I have had to make many choices, omitting many worthy examples. One subgroup that alone could extend to thousands of images – the colors of light – is represented by just eight small works presenting the primary and secondary colors (as well as one example of pastel lighting).

Most, if not all, of the images could represent more than one attribute. The light at dawn, depending on the season and amount of atmospheric moisture can just as well be cool or warm. An image identified as an evening image can be shot under diffused light if the sun is already below the horizon. The choice of attribute to highlight may thus be arbitrary and my object became the presentation of a range of possibilities, which will, I hope, stimulate your imagination, thus fulfilling my real purpose in this exhibition.

The haiku accompanying the images are my own, not the finest examples of the art to be sure, but an added dimension to the individual works. Unlike traditional haiku which represent the season in which they are written, these employ seasonal words to suggest either the season in which the image itself was created or else my mood when viewing the image.