My father, a PhD nuclear physicist specializing in the field of optics, first introduced this concept of “light writing” called photography to me as a teenager. He was smart. In fact so smart, he developed the technology for the camera on the Apollo 11 which made live video feed from the moon to earth possible. The first steps of man on the moon were recorded in images for the entire world to witness.
Watching the event on TV on July 20, 1969, I knew I wanted to write with light.
I lacked the understanding at that time of how the camera actually worked. So for many decades I happily clicked away letting the camera make the decisions for me on how the light would be written into an image. RAW files, pixels, ISO and color balance were of no concern to me. However, often the final images were not the way I saw it in my mind.
It was time to learn the intricacies of how a camera actually worked. When I look at a page of my father’s many articles on the properties of light, I am grateful to all the “light writers” of the past. Photographers such as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier- Bresson or Dorothea Lange paved the way for what makes a great photograph both in technique and in composition.
However, the men and woman dedicated to capturing images in space were at the technological forefront of trying to “see the light of the cosmos.” Their scientific advances for the space program set the foundations for our modern day cameras and in my father’s case, for night surveillance as well as helping certain types of blindness see again. You can learn more about his accomplishments under Gerhard W Goetze in Wikipedia.
To “light write” you have to know the properties of light. And these many scientists of the 1950’s and 1960’s immersed themselves into the question “what is light?”
For me, just to use light in a way to capture an extraordinary image would be my small contribution to history.