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Almost all architectural drawings are diagrammatic. That is, they show a simplified and schematic

representation of structures rather than presenting any kind of realistic image. Architectural, engineering, and other technical drawings have a language of line types and line weights that needs to be understood before the viewer is able to fully decipher the drawing. When producing information for people outside the design profession you need to watch your language. In the same way that you cannot expect clients to understand all the technical jargon and phrases that accompany lighting, you should not expect them to be able to easily understand the implied meaning of technical drawings.

Although nonspecialists may have trouble with the subtle details of an architectural plan, almost everyone has a highly developed understanding of diagrammatic visual language. Tapping into this common language can help to convey complex information easily.

One of the most potent symbols that can be used to explain light is the arrow. The path of light may be invisible to us, but the direction from which it hits a surface makes a significant impact upon the lit effect of any space. A single arrow in a lighting diagram can imply both the location of a light source and the intended focus for that light. People tend to intuitively understand the size of an arrow as having some relationship to quantity

—a large arrow from a light source suggests more light than a small arrow from another source. Color quality can be suggested, with daylight arrows being a different color from electric light ones.

There are many more diagrammatic methods that can be used to help people understand lighting proposals. Examples of photo collage can be seen on page 131, where photographs of the existing site have been overlaid with drawn elements to demonstrate design ideas. In the illustrations on pages 160 and 161, rendered section drawings are collaged onto a sunset background to add interest and time of day context. Sometimes the effectiveness of simple photographic manipulation cannot be beaten, as shown in the sequence on pages 94 and 95.

Whatever the illustrative technique chosen to help people understand lighting proposals, the most important information to deliver is usually the location of the luminaires and what areas or surfaces they will illuminate. Once that is understood, other information can be included. Always try to ensure that each presentation image is as succinct as possible; too much information can make drawings unreadable. If you were trying to describe the scene in words, you would split the description into paragraphs to aid legibility; you should do the same with drawings, using separate images to tell different parts of the story.

Left

Sketch analysis of proposed lighting for a cathedral. The schematic section drawing uses light and shade to indicate the spread of light from each luminaire. The drawing also uses diagrammatic arrows to indicate the principal direction for each light source.

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Below

Also built on a CAD drawing, this section of the same project has been rendered in Photoshop to produce a more polished result. This kind of image is typically used for a PowerPoint presentation to the client. The actual locations of the luminaires are not important in this case, so they have been omitted and only the lit effect is shown.

Left

This presentation drawing by Kevan Shaw Lighting Design shows a section through the circulation space of a multipurpose arts venue, the Public, West Bromwich, UK. Built on a CAD drawing, it shows the location of luminaires in red and adds a hand-drawn rendering of the vibrant color of the internal space. This kind of image allows all the members of a design team to understand the location of the lighting and the lit effect it will produce.

Photography

When it comes to recording scenes the way we experience them, the phrase “the camera never lies” has probably never been true. While there are passing similarities between a camera and our eyes, the processing and recording mechanisms are so radically different that photography can never hope to record exactly what we see. Part of the problem is that what we “see” is only partly to do with the visual information gathered by our eyes, and has a lot to do with the brain adding layers of interpretation and past experience to try to make sense of the visual data.

Photography can be very useful for recording what a scene looks like, but this is not the same as recording what it feels like. All forms of photography are restricted by having a much lower dynamic range than the visual system. The higher contrast of film and digital photography makes for a simplified view that is, literally, more black and white than our visual experience of the

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Opposite and left

Photography can be useful for recording lighting tests and demonstrating the benefits and pitfalls of a lighting solution. These before (opposite) and after (left) images show how the dark, cave- like quality of a reception area was transformed by the addition of fluorescent uplighting mounted on top of the canopy, making the scene much more of a visual attractor. However, the images also reveal the problem created by the gloss paint on the soffit, which creates a specular reflection that allows the fluorescent luminaires to be seen reflected in the ceiling (the white patches on the ceiling). The camera has exaggerated the contrast in the scene, and this has overemphasized the reflection problem. However, this can help to make the problem clear to others and demonstrates that any permanent lighting solution would have to work around it.

same scene. Techniques such as high dynamic range (HDR) photography, where several different exposures are combined into one image, attempt to match our vision more closely. But the further restrictions presented by the limited dynamic and color ranges of printing and screen- based image display mean designers should be aware that photography is not the same as seeing.

If photography is our only record of a site we have visited, we have probably not looked at the space properly. Even the two minutes it takes to produce a simple

thumbnail sketch provides an infinitely better appreciation of the three-dimensional geometry, structure, and pattern of light in a space. As a recording medium, photography works best as a way of reminding the designer what he or she actually experienced. Nevertheless, as long as its limitations are recognized, photography can be useful for recording lighting tests and mock-ups in order to show the design ideas to others.