06.26.2025
It’s Summer here in the Pacific Northwest, but today was very reminiscent of a cooler, rainier, cloudier day. When I first began my journey as a photographer, I avoided sunny days. It was harder for me to get a branded “style” to my photographs when light dramatically changes between light and dark.
So, I would seek out cloudy days, days where the light was diffused and even, and where I felt in control of how my images were going to turn out. But I wasn’t understanding the importance in contrast.
I will speak frequently about the space in between contrast when it comes to photography and the way that I have learned to view to world around me. However, this blog is about something even more important.
Light is everything.
And I mean this in an artistic way but also like a fundamental existing sort of way as well.
On today’s cloudy adventures, I was not planning on taking photographs, and believe it or not, 10 years into doing this, I still have epiphanies that blow my mind as I encounter the natural world over and over.
I decided to at least pack a battery and memory card just in case I decided to whip the camera out.
I was driving down a country road, and it started pouring rain. Clouds were thick in the sky, and that lead my mind to this conversation with myself:
“How do I know that light is everything? Because even when the sky is full of clouds, and the world has forgotten the sun, color remains. It becomes quieter, and sometimes hard to spot, but the color doesn’t go anywhere until there is an absence of light entirely.”
Now, expand on this idea with me for a moment.
Light is often seen as the source, the sign, and sustainer of life. Color isn’t a think by itself. It is light and how it’s interacting with matter. And we, humans, and everything that surrounds us, are also just light. Light is not just around us, it is us.
What about when things are dark? What about those moments where there appears to be no light at the end?
Darkness is often mistaken to be void of light and void of color. Even when the moon is dark and the night sky falls, the world still holds color. It is just whispering instead of shouting.
We are not without light. We are simply needing to learn to see it in it’s quieter forms.
