The Last Light, Last Night...

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

The concept behind this photo came to me while I was thinking about a layout for a photo. It started as a guy sitting on a bed blowing out a candle. Just a really simple serene image. The phrase "The Last Light" popped into my head, and had a nice ring. Oftentimes, I like to make the titles for my images have a catchy feel to them... sometimes I'll have harsh consonants, sometimes I'll use softer words, sometimes a little bit of rhyme or alliteration. So I thought about the scene and decided to add "Last Night" to the end "The Last Light, Last Night"... perfect. But then I started to think about what was the "Last Light". At face value it is the candle... but what if I take it just a bit further... Technically, light has to travel from point A to point B. So wouldn't it be interesting if you could take a photo of a candle being extinguished, and your timing of the shutter was so precise that you captured it where the candle was out, but the last bit of traveling light was still illuminating something (in this case, the subject's face). The final image was how I wanted it to be, but I would have loved to explore further a method for showing that last bit of traveling light. I think there might be a way to illustrate it afterward with some graphical work in post-processing. Or, if this scene were painted or drawn I could also think of ways to depict it. But for now, I'll consider this a "scratchpad" concept, and how I've captured it and titled it will be in my portfolio to review at some point in the future.