A Little Transparency Helps
In my past I’ve been a theatrical lighting designer. I’m not professionally trained, I just sort of picked it up by working with community theater groups. A friend who is a professionally-trained lighting designer once gave me a tip about darkness, in one of those situations where I was trying to illuminate only a small part of the stage for a particular scene: “Always leave some light on the rest of the stage. Humans get curious about what they can’t see, and they won’t realize it but they’ll spend a bunch of time watching the absolute darkness instead of what you want them to watch.” When I light a show I usually have some general “down” light available, so the …