The lighting art Author:Matthew Luckiesh Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III VISUALIZATION To state that visualizing a desired effect in lighting is the surest means of ultimately realizing the contemplated goal is merely ... more »to enunciate a corollary to the more general statement that imagination is the source of creative efforts. The ability to visualize is especially essential in approaching lighting problems in which the artistic aspect dominates, but it must be present in approaching any lighting problem. First, it is necessary to separate illumination and brightness which are respectively cause and effect. Illumination is independent of the surface at which it is measured but brightness depends upon the reflection-factor and character of the surface. Visualizing the effect of a lighting installation in terms of the illumination which it is expected to supply on various work-planes is not visualizing the actual lighting effects for the latter involve relative brightnesses and colors and their distributions. Furthermore, lighting when done by considering only illumination is in general neither scientific nor artistic. The activities which are to be pursued at various points in the room should be considered and an attempt should be made to visualize the process of seeing in each case. Backgrounds against which the work is viewed are often of as much importance as the intensity of illumination. Lighting should have the aim of providing good seeing if this is essential and the visualizing ability is taxed in such a case as well as in producing artistic results where these are important. Lighting has not been developed to an exact science in its brief existence as a specialized activity so that it is quite legitimate to resort to experimental installations when possible; however, the necessity for such procedure decreases as the lighting spec...« less