Effect of Sunlight in Photography

Cloud Optics

I began photographing clouds accidentally, in 1995, in preparing to speak at the J. B. Rhine memorial at the annual Parapsychology Association conference. The unexpected sky shots I caught in finishing off a roll of film made me remember that I had often dreamed of looking up and seeing “impossible” floating, shifting cloud panaromas. These clouds I stared at, while dreaming, had realistic scenes in them, as in a movie, though once I began “filming” them by camera, I was immediately bitten by the bug of experimentating with light.

“What we normally see exists only inside a visible range of light, and that excludes ultraviolet and infrared,” I thought. “What would be the effect if, in a photograph, you deliberately captured slight amounts of ultraviolet and infrared?” It looked like to me that had happened. This question turned my photography into research.

To take the photographs, I would stare up into the sky, feeling my state of awareness shift into meditation. I seemed to enter the cloud space, discovering edges that slowly deepened to reveal forms. Finally, at night, sitting in bed with my booklet of 4 x 6 prints, I would re-enter that mood. What at first looked very ordinary would sharpen, open mundane clouds into cloulds with images.

The shapes that this meditative, relaxed state brought out fed an impulse to create “paintings,” produced by the enlarged light range—as if Seeing into the Invisible, Beyond Where the Range of Our Sight Stops.

My first exhibit was in Romania in the mid-90s (The Sun in Profile: So Bright It’s Dark). That title reflects the fact that in my experiments with the sun, the background sky or the ground (buildings) might turn brown, when printed, in order to accommodate the White Point that revealed the otherwise-invisible images – caught in the most brilliant sunlight – which otherwise would be a blown-out hole in the development. With what we normally see darkened (so that the ground objects were silhouettes), then we can sometimes see what we normally would not. The photography became a metaphor to me for seeing beyond our normal range, into subtle energy – because much is out there beneath or beyond what our vision brings to us. Not to mention the selectivity we use when seeing, our brains even blocking out some things that are in fact there or in other ways misleading us, a statement about which even science and psychology agree.

As I took light body courses, this photography was a perfect outlet to express the new range of perception and awareness I began operating in: that quick, virtually instant descent into a meditative state brought on by staring at the clouds became a companion that brought joy similar to the joy I got lager flipping through the 4 x 6 booklets at night in bed. The clouds would open up once again and a mystical state descend over them and me, taking me inside their landscapes. Try it.