Designing ze luminaire.

         As a prerequisite to coming up with a luminaire design, our task was to find and document an interesting light effect.  I thought I'd find a phenomenon unique in its quality.  My solution was to use the camera as a medium for capturing the effect, rather than capturing an effect that is primarily seen by the naked eye and then documented with the camera.  Cut out the middle man.  With the camera as a medium, I am guaranteed a pure representation, not an obfuscated, second-hand image.
          The light effect I found is called lens flare.  It occurs when the camera is pointed directly at the sun.  This causes the light to fray out in beams with the sun's form as a focal point (shown upper right).  I wanted to take this phenomenon and display this overwhelming quality of light.  My original design of a translucent dome which would house the light bulb and be mounted onto a wall.  Slits would be cut into the edges for beams of light to pass through (shown left).  Unfortunately, this design required a very thin frame so as to not be seen through the paper when the bulb was lit.  Also, I did not want to replicate the sun shot for shot.  It is never a good start if the designer tries to exactly replicate what is already perfect in nature.

         Instead, I chose to design a luminaire positioned at the joining of the wall and the floor.  The rays radiate out, but only onto the wall.  I first built a frame consisting of only 4 sides of a hexagon.  Then, with a bandsaw, I cut slits about 2 inches long into the wood cuts.  After using wood glue to connect all four of these pieces, I traced the semi-hexagonal shape onto a piece of matboard.  This I hot-glued onto the back of the wood frame, a plane which serves primarily as my bulb holder.  Now, I was faced with the issue of covering my light switch.  Otherwise, it would distract the observer from the actual light effect.  My solution was to construct a dome around it, concealing it, except for a small hole from which the wire would pass through.  As my medium was again, matboard, this process took a good deal of time to create just the right forms that fit together properly.  At the time, I felt that I needed to do something to the dome to ensure that it had continuity of the light effect.  This would have been the way to go if my piece were about the light fixture, rather than the effect itself.  That is the main thing I would have done differently.

   
    When lit up, I feel my luminaire most accurately demonstrates lens flare when positioned about half an inch off of a wall.  Had I kept it flush to the wall, the focus would be on the sharp distinction between light and dark.  By keeping it slightly off the wall, I created the effect of light pushing into the boundaries of the shadow, thus accentuating light's overwhelming quality.

This is lens flare.