Lumos

The weeks preceding finals are bleary-eyed and coffee-scented, punctuated by the restless clicking of keyboards and the shuffling of pages and episodes of forgetfulness. Lights gleam cold and florescent, the apathetic overseer of offices and classrooms, penetrating into libraries and dormitory rooms, a flat unforgiving glare that attempts to mimic the light of day but is never quite able to replicate it. They glaze windows into opaque sheets of blackened mirror until there is nothing outside; there exists only the image of you, notes and references lying in a sprawl before you, lit perhaps by a rectangular screen of blue-white light. Thoroughly unpleasant, indeed.

Warm, dim lighting is not necessarily conductive to productivity. A hazy oddslot glow might lull you into a sense of contentment, and the pool of light a single lamp spreads does little better than its cooler, flatter cousin. But sometimes- sometimes- in the hours past logic or reason- all one wants is some nice light, really, that doesn’t feel like a sledgehammer to the skull. Mixed lighting can be a good balance, of course, as long as the most unusual temperatures or colors are not the most dominant.

Diffuse light, though, tends to be a nice all-purpose. Bright or dim, warm or cool, day or night, the quality of the light is even without being cutting. String lights (Christmas lights, holiday lights), especially in neutral colors, I’ve found, work wonders in serving as versatile (and flexible) substitutes for single-bulb lamps. Alternatively, a lamp pointed at a white wall or ceiling lets the light bounce off those surfaces, creating a more even consistency that is often better for reading than a clearly defined pool of light sitting directly on one’s page, or a direct light that creates glares.

Thinking about lighting for spaces is in principle not unlike thinking about lighting for the camera, but it is certainly less complex and entirely more rewarding.