Back to work
Singapore 10th August 2010
The first day back from leave is always tough isn’t it? Certainly if you add some jetlag and climate change in the mix! Your sleep and eat patterns are thrown upside down, let alone that your body has to adjust to sudden environmental change. I arrived back in hot and humid Singapore yesterday after having spent a delicious time in mild France near the sea. I managed to totally switch off and really enjoy quality time, but then there is the shock upon return …how to catch a running train? 🙂
Basically you have to build up speed again and get back into the rhythm. Accept the fact that you were away and that project life has progressed without you (as it should!). If you look at it our aim in a way is to make ourselves obsolete. If the business solely depends on you being present to operate you have a problem as you basically cannot afford to go on leave. Unfortunately for many small lighting design practices, that is the case. Fortunately for me I have now a great team that is able to fill in for me when I am away. Nobody is irreplaceable…even though we like to think we are!
When you build up your team your first thought is to build clones of yourself, because you feel you know best, right? But I learned that that is probably the worst thing to do as everyone has their own character, strengths and weaknesses. The strategy is to bring out the best of each individual which does not mean for them to become another me! On the contrary…there is more than one lighting solution to a lighting problem, so encouragement of one’s creative and problem solving skills is vital. A leader should not be afraid to create student that can beat the master!
To get back up to speed my first task today was to get an update from my team on the progress and any issues that need my attention. But sideways it also allowed me to see how each had progressed individually in growing to become a great lighting designer…
National Day Celebrations
Singapore 9th August 2010
Today, on my arrival back in Singapore, it is national day, the day that Singapore celebrates its birth as a nation, now 45 years ago. Though a tiny nation with relatively little history, the national day celebrations bring people together and create a moment to reflect on the nations incredible achievements. They have much to be proud of.
Which made me think of lighting and whether we should have some national lighting day? Lighting has come a long way, but what could constitute the start of lighting as we know it? The first oil lamp or candle? The first electric light bulb?
It was in the 17th century that Sir Isaac Newton proposed the theory that electricity consisted of little particles with further scientists of the time subsequently confirming the generally accepted wave theory for electricity. He also studied the relation between light and colour. Or even before Newton there was Leonardo Da Vinci who experimented with reflections, refractions and mirrors. But generally Thomas Edison is being credited for commercializing the first electric lamp when he set up his Edison Electric Light company in 1878.
So what could we celebrate on a yearly basis? What date would be a relevant date to all. The problem is that there have been many relevant date and choosing one is likely to upset protagonists of other dates. So maybe it should be a universal date related to nature. Should we celebrate the longest day as the day of light? But that would mean the shortest day for people on the other hemisphere. Or maybe we should celebrate both? We celebrate light and darkness, one can’t exist without the other.
Let me know if any of you have any suggestion. I think we should celebrate light somehow…
Paris by night
France 8th August 2010
On a stopover in Paris on our way back to Singapore. Decided to do Paris by night, what else should one do as a lighting designer! Isn’t Paris called la “Ville Lumiere?” Two unfortunate things, first it is only dark around 10pm at this time of the year, second it is summer holidays meaning most of the Parisians are on holiday out of town, leaving mostly tourists. This means many outlets are closed for the holidays and you hear a lot of foreign languages! Not enough to stop us…on the contrary!
We decided to go out for dinner on one of the islands in the river Seine, Ile St Louis, which has a lot of nice little restaurants with traditional French cuisine. The streets are old with cobblestones and the street lanterns reminiscent of the old oil lamps. It is not difficult to imagine the Lutetia (the way Paris was called) a long time ago. With the lights coming out of the little restaurants the ambiance is very warm and peaceful.
A bit further away is the Notre Dame and the Hotel de Ville majestically lit in the old traditional way with floodlights. It still works very well. In the distance one can see the Eifel Tower lit as the countries famous landmark. You cant be in Paris without having seen the Eifel Tower, can you?
On our walk back to the Metro after a really delicious meal in the perfect restaurant we crossed one of the bridges which are all lit and watched several “Bateaux Mouches” (the river tour boats) cruise up and down the river. The clever thing they invented in Paris is that these boats carry their own floodlights lighting up the river banks, providing the people on board a great (illuminated) view at night of the beautiful and historic buildings along the way. I think that is a very clever and effective way, rather the n having all the buildings individually lit.
Paris, like Sydney, New York and other world cities continuously re-invents itself with new attractions. Right now it is the famous, Paris-Plage or Paris at the Beach. Along the river throughout the city beach type activities have been set up that provide fun and entertainment during the summer months for those who do not have the opportunity to go to the beach. The result is a lively and cheerful environment even at night. A nice end to our very enjoyable holiday…
Son & Lumiere
France 7th August 2010
I am not sure who invented the sound and light shows, but the fact that they are also commonly known as Son & Lumiere does give thought that it may have been invented in France. The French can be very creative… I would have to check out the history on this one.
Last night I went to see a S&L in an old Manor about 10 mins away from where I am staying. Of course I could not leave without having seen it as it was billed as a really good one. It is quite common in France to have S&L shows organized during the summer holidays to entertain the tourists. Often with old historic castles as background. This old manor (400 years old) was the home of a famous French discoverer (Jacques Cartier) who tried to find an western route to China and discovered Canada in the process. The S&L tells his life story through breathtaking imagery projected on three buildings that use to be his home.
What makes S&L shows so spectacular these days is that technology has so much evolved that it no more is a dynamic show of changing colours from floodlights but a complete intelligent multi screen projection. In other words, using the buildings as the frame for projection, the latest projection techniques allow you to project anything you can imagine on a computer. In this case they used 3 synchronized projectors which seamlessly showed the story in “wide screen”. It had the same sophistication as what was seen at the recent opening ceremony for the winter Olympic Games for instances. Ships and stars projected on the buildings or people projected as moving behind windows, very realistic, yet the colours and imagery were magical and like a dream.
I have been involved in old conventional S&L shows with Philips 25 years ago, like the ones on the Pyramids of Gizeh, which where using standard floodlights with color filters. At the time it was one color, one floodlight! How far have we progressed! Whatever we can imagine can now be created. Our minds are our own limitation, the technology is there to translate our dreams….
Changing a lightbulb
France 6th August 2010
Do you realize there are people who do not know how to change a light bulb? I have been brought up by a dad who was good in handy work and me and my siblings have inherited that handyman skill from my him. My brothers are extremely good at it and capable of building a bathroom, a shed or fixing a car. I am like that too but my hectic work and travel is not really conducive to these kind of things. Time is in short supply so its easier to get someone to fix it. In fact I am having my apartment repainted while being away, but it is something I could have easily done myself…lazy? No not really, just practical and a different set of priorities at the moment.
But there are people in my own (French) family who honestly do not know how to change a light bulb. They are known to call an electrician to do that! Sounds silly to many of you but there are people like that. Some just because they are to snob or lazy to do it, some (like elderly people) who are genuinely not able or have little knowledge of electricity. These people (if they don’t have helpful family or friends) have no choice as to pay $45 for an electrician. I pay $90 for an IT guy to help me fix any computer problems as I simply have not enough knowledge to do it myself. I have some knowledge but always fear I may make it worse by engaging in irreparable actions. My laptop is my life!
Changing light bulbs is a necessary evil, not much we can do about it. The incandescent bulb with a screw or bajonet cap is fairly easy if you can reach the lighting point. A bit more difficult if it means climbing up a ladder to replace a ceiling light. You still need to make sure you get the right wattage! (Compact) fluorescent lights have a much longer life so the frequency is much less (I recently changed one after more than 5 years use!). The extra problem here is to get the right replacement colour.
LED’s seem to make life even more easier with their long life span prediction, however the system itself is much more complicated and the way we are going we may indeed realy need an electrician to replace them in the future!
Come to your senses
France 5th August 2010
Continuing on my blog from yesterday, one of the main things when you relax is that realise that you have more than one sense… :). Certainly as a lighting designer always focused on the visual! True enough, 80% of our sensory experience is through our eyes, but what about sound, smell, taste and feel senses? Somehow they seem relegated to the back compared to the visual sense. But with my visual senses less active the other senses have become much more apparent (at least to me…).
Sounds. At night I am more aware of the wind (I am staying near the beach) and in the morning I can hear the birds, mostly seagulls, singing. It makes you more aware of nature and certainly adds to the appreciation and enjoyment. Specifically when most of my time I spent in big cities like Singapore or Shanghai, which somehow never seem to sleep and where construction noise can be heard throughout the day and traffic noise even throughout the night!
Smell. Because of the slower pace of life somehow there is time to “smell the roses”. The smell of the see air, the smell of the markets, the smell of flowers, the smell of food. I guess we always do smell things but somehow we don’t really register it let alone take the time to take it in as part of the environment we are in at that moment.
Taste. Somehow food seems to taste better when you are out in the countryside and actually take the time to enjoy your meal, certainly when freshly cooked! In my case I am enjoying fresh seafood, meat, vegetables and fruits we fetch fresh from the market every morning.
Feel. This is very much an action that needs dedicated time and attention. Whether we feel the sand with our feet or filtering through our fingers, touch a tree or the texture of stones. It is a dedicated effort. And then there is the touch and feel of just a simple hug with your loved one…
My point today is that lighting is just one of the components of a complete design. The perfect design harmonises all sensory experiences…
Back to basics
France 4th August 2010
At the moment I am pretty much getting up when the sun rises and go to bed at sunset, sometimes even earlier. This is because of the summer time here with the sun coming up around 6am and setting down around 10pm! So my exposure to electric light is very minimal and basic, in fact I sleep without the blinds closed at night!
The interesting thing with being on holiday is that you are generally less fuzzy about things. I am the type of person that just wants to relax and re-energise and the last thing on my mind is worrying about luxury. I like my comfort but what I am saying is that I don’t need a Foscarini hanging of the ceiling, I am perfectly happy with a bare light bulb…which is actually the case at the place where I am staying 🙂
Taking a break from hectic work and life allows you to go “back to basics”. No TV, no internet (though I make an exception for this blog), no email, no phone and certainly no sophisticated lighting systems and scene sets for lighting! It is funny how you stream along with life’s expectations, which somehow seem artificially created. I guess I am guilty of creating lighting expectations as much as anybody else. So much so that I realize how difficult it has become to design something simple and basic!
Now that I have the time to take a step back, just enjoy life and spend quality time with my family I realize how much we have drifted away from our basic needs. Part of the green movement certainly includes going back to basics. In the early days people got by with just fire, torches and candles.
At heart we are simple beings and easily satisfied with just our basic needs. Sophisticated lighting is certainly not one of them even though we like to believe as lighting designers it is!
Just looking…
France 3rd August 2010
One of the things we do when strolling around markets or shops is just looking…we look at beautiful things we can’t afford or just imagine how it would fit you or suit your home interior…you know what I am talking about.
As a lighting designer we have this professional urge to always look around for lighting. Just looking how they did it…I learn most from “just looking”. I find it very instructive and at times provides me with great ideas for ways to implement lighting in a project. So when I go out and about shopping or out for dinner I look around and try to decipher the lighting and lighting effects that I come across. Some people are really creative in the way they apply lighting and the decorative lighting effects they achieve.
But we learn most from the “bad examples”. If you train yourself to analyse and look at lighting installations around you whether outdoors or indoors, you find the most educational environment you can imagine just at your door step. Good examples are not always that obvious as they sort of blend in, while the bad ones stare you in the face as they create glare, do not seem to fit or provide ugly shadows, etc, etc. But it is an acquired skill as most of us just look without seeing, if you understand what I mean. Like the expression, stop to smell the roses, I would say, stop to experience the lighting. Just looking…
On another note, this morning I went to a local bric-a brac market and saw an array of old marine type light fittings, bulk heads, search lights and the like. Heavy copper and glass with the traditional incandescent light sources which are hard to find these days. Others were selling old glass shades and lamps straight from “grand mothers” time…nostalgia. We live in such a modern environment and with such pace that we don’t take the time anymore to look around and enjoy…my holiday is a perfect time to relax, take my time, enjoy and just look around…
Filters
France, 2nd August 2010
When you are out in the sun like I am at the moment, you really need to put on some protection. With that I mean UV protection. I have a tendency to “burn” quickly, so I generally put on some of the highest UV protection grades available. As we had forgotten to bring it along we went to buy some today. It was not a simple as I thought as they come in creams, oils and sprays! I opted for the spray as it seems easy to apply… 🙂
As the sun spray acts as a filter on your skin (cutting of the damaging UV rays) it got me thinking about the way we use filters in lighting. With the arrival of color controllable LED’s the need for color filters is gradually diminishing, but there still seems to be a great use for filters for our traditional light sources. We mostly use filters for color correction, for color absorption or reinforcement and light beam adaptations. From the lighting manufacturers we know that they offer standard color filters mostly related to natural light such as blue and amber. Also like sunscreen filters we apply UV filters to cut out harmful light to sensitive objects, specifically when it comes to artworks and paintings.
I am not a great user of color filters because I believe in the “natural” approach but there is certainly a place for color filters to reinforce or dramatise lighting effects. For those of us with experience in the theatre and stage lighting world, color filters are key to creating certain moods. It maybe a hint of a color and hardly noticeable to the untrained eye but its these small additions that can add that extra feel to a space. Regardless to the final need I think it is important that light fittings have the option to include a filter of some sort. These are the little tools we have to create that extra effect in our lighting designs.
In a totally out of the box thought, would it be possible to spray our color and correction filters on to our light sources, just the way we spray the sun protection on to our body?
Daylight
France 1st August 2010
Being on holiday means basically I am switching off my lighting design mode of thinking as much as I can. This also means that my blog is now not so much guided by my daily lighting design activities but by lighting as I experience during the day as a “normal human being”…..
One of the things that strikes me most is the difference in the colour and brightness of the day light. It struck me when I first came to Australia in comparison to the light I had been used to in Singapore and it strikes me time and again when I travel to different places around the world. Depending on where you are the light and the sky can look so different!
Shanghai is most of the time muggy, cloudy and grey. When the sun comes out people really get out to enjoy the moment as a near special event. But the light is not crisp, there is some sort of veil that seems to filter the light. Clear blue skies do not really occur in a big city like Shanghai. Singapore is not much better, but the colour of the light is somewhat different. Though truth be told, most big cities are affected by pollution making the appreciation of the actual daylight very difficult.
It is well known the photographers do like the crisp and clear day light that is present further away from the equator such as the southern hemispheres cities of Sydney or Perth. The light comes in at much steeper angles then in Singapore which is practically located on the equator. The breaking of the light through the earth’s atmosphere creates that difference in light colour. Likewise the light here in France where I am is very reminiscent of that of Sydney.
The way we can experience day light is nearly the reversed way of how we experience the night. Where you experience nice, clear and crisp daylight is generally also where you can experience the clear starry nights. I am lucky and fortunate to be in a position to enjoy the way nature was intended to be. It makes you appreciate it even more knowing how it is in Shanghai, Singapore and many other cities in the world….
The long awaited book compilation of Martin's first year of blogging is available. Order now.
Feedspot Top 100 Lighting Blogs