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Tracery of Light and Shadow

Essays on light, colour and perception — for people who shoot and for people who just look

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“Madame X”: the whole pose rests on one supporting hand — the rest of the body simply follows it

Photography · 3 September 2026 · 10 minWhat to do with your hands when a camera is looking at you“Relax” is not a command: hands need not a beautiful position but a familiar task, weight and support

“The School of Athens” — the point of balance beyond which that language had nowhere left to go

Art · 1 September 2026 · 10 minHow the Renaissance endsA cultural language dies before the craft does: artists still command proportion and perspective, but no longer believe those things explain the world

Caillebotte: the diagonals of the pavement and the umbrella carry the eye into the depth before the viewer has made out a single face

Photography · 27 August 2026 · 10 minWhere the eye actually looks in a photographThe brightest patch is only one signal among many; faces, colour, text and any strange detail all compete with it for the right to come first

Lascaux: images are older than writing — and even then they were not made “just because”

Art · 25 August 2026 · 10 minWhat is art for, anywayCommissions, money and the market are not obstacles to art but its ordinary conditions; the question is what it does to us in return

“The Night Watch”: not a row of faces but a system of connections — light, gestures and glances carry the viewer through the whole group

Photography · 21 August 2026 · 10 minThe group portrait: how to walk a viewer’s eye through a crowdWhy a large company in a frame falls apart into a list of faces — and how to bind it back together with looks, gestures and light

The blue hour in a photograph: the scene goes cold on its own, with no colour grading

Photography · 19 August 2026 · 12 minThe Purkinje effect: how dusk changes not only colour, but the way a photograph feelsWhy red sinks into shadow at twilight while blue stays bright — and what to do with that in post