The Light and Color Scientist

Some conversations stay with you because of what was said. This one stayed with me because of how differently the other person was looking at the same room I was sitting in.

He works with light and colour for a living. Not as a decorator and not as an artist, exactly, but as somebody who knows what light does and why your eye believes it. I went in expecting a technical conversation and came out thinking about almost everything else.

Nobody sees the same room

The first thing he said that stopped me: two people in the same room are not looking at the same colours. Not quite. The light bounces differently to each of them, and the brain of each one corrects for it in its own way, confidently, without asking permission.

I have been standing in rooms with people for seventy years operating on the assumption that we were at least seeing the same thing. Apparently not. It explains a great deal.

Light is mostly decisions

He pointed out that almost nothing you see is lit by accident. Somebody chose it. The stage, the shop, the screen you are reading this on, the lamp in your front room. Every one of those is a decision somebody made about how you would feel standing there.

Once he said it I could not stop noticing it, which is either a gift or a mild curse depending on the day.

You do not see objects. You see light that has been somewhere.

What I took away

That the small technical choices nobody notices are usually the ones doing the work. That being an expert in a narrow thing makes you interesting about wide things, not narrow ones. And that I should ask more people what they actually do all day.

More conversations like this one are on the way.