Week 7: Shadows

 This morning, I noticed some shadows on my living room walls, cast by the window blinds.  I thought it interesting that the shadows weren't forming a crisp edge on the wall, and thought I would look into it further.  It reminded me of the way I see things when I look at something with both eyes, and then switch back and forth between one eye or the other being open: a slightly different point of view, that meets in the middle to produce one image when I have both eyes open.  I don't think this is actually what's happening here (there certainly aren't two suns casting light through the window), but it seemed somehow similar.

When I got up close to the wall, and cast a shadow with my hand very close to the same surface, the shadow was much crisper, much more what I expected it to be.  It was visually interesting to me to have the crisp shadow side by side with the fuzzy one.

Without knowing the technical terms for these different types of shadows, it made me wonder if this is similar to what happens when we are focusing lights, and we adjust the focus.  The actual source of light (lamp) is being moved closer or further away from the surface of the lens


(or vice versa), producing a harder or softer edge.  It also reminded me of using any sort of shadow projection on a screen onstage - the less space between the projection screen and the object, the clearer / crisper the shadow is.

It would also have been fun to experiment and try to add some color to the light - would the fuzzier edges of the shadow had any color in them?  Where would the color stop, if the shadow itself isn't given a hard edge?  And apart from moving the window closer to the wall, or my whole apartment closer to the sun, would there have been any ways to get the fuzzy shadows to sharpen up their focus?