Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
I always think of shade as being full of light. That is why I like to use the word shade rather than light and shadow. Shade seems to play over the thing, envelop it, better define it, while shadow seems to fall on the thing and stain the surface with darks.
In the real world there are many tones, from white at one extreme, through a large number of medium tones to black at the other extreme. To achieve a three-dimensional effect on paper you need just three - white, black and medium gray.
There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.
My grandfather always sang about the light, and for some reason, I don't know why, it even goes back to when I was seven, eight years old, I've always been attracted to the dark.
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
The whole switch from film to digital has changed some of the ways I use color and the juxtaposition of light and dark. It's getting better with digital, the separation's gotten better, but I still feel like it's really flatter than film, so I do a lot of screening and subtle textural printing and painting on clothes for film to get it not to look flat.
