Six Ways of Looking at a Vase- Plus a Side Quest

After experimenting with the new gratings on an ordinary light bulb, I wanted to know how they would behave on a different kind of subject. The bulb test was a point source — all the light originating from a single small glowing object. What would happen if the subject was not the light source itself, but an object lit by a light source? Specifically, a vase on a shelf in a corner of my house, under a single warm recessed ceiling light. Some of my favorite photos have come from this vase already.

I also took the gratings to the doctor's office, because the appointment was long and the ceiling was interesting.

Here is what I found.

The vase.

Same gratings as before — 50, 80, broken 100, new 100, 300, 600 — pointed at a pale ceramic vase on a shelf, lit from above by warm tungsten.

The biggest discovery from this round is that the subject geometry matters as much as the grating. The bulb was small and round and bright. The vase is large and matte and dim by comparison. The light source is still overhead, but now the scene is mostly receiving surface — wall, vase, shelf — with a small bright source dominating the top of the frame.

What changed:

• 50 l/mm still bathed the whole frame in warmth, but with the vase as the subject, the warmth became atmospheric rather than enveloping. The vase silhouetted dark against a golden wall. It looked like a sunset rather than a sunrise.

• 80 l/mm behaved similarly to the 50 — minimal spectral activity, dominant source color — but slightly more refined. A quieter warmth.

• Broken 100 produced a beautiful diagonal rainbow sweep across the frame, with the vase anchoring the center and a doubled spectral reflection at the shelf. This is the one I would frame. The broken grating's tendency to layer warmth, halo, and discrete spectral bands all at once made the most painterly composition of the set.

• New 100 was clean and peachy in tone. The vase visible, the wall soft, the spectrum present only as faint pastel halos. Refined is the word.

• 300 l/mm gave me discrete spectral bands cutting across the frame in graphic streaks. The vase was almost an apparition and the rainbows became punctuation surrounding it.

• 600 l/mm produced horizontal arcs of spectrum sweeping across the frame in unexpected ways — not the vertical stack I got from the bulb, but curving bands following the geometry of the recessed light cone. The 600 keeps surprising me.

The takeaway: the gratings are responsive instruments, not style filters. The broken 100 produced one mood in the bathroom (warm, ring-haloed, ecstatic) and a totally different mood with the vase (diagonal, painterly, atmospheric). I'm curious to see how some of these behave against other subjects I've already photographed. 

The doctor's office.

I had an appointment to get through, and the ceiling had two large square fluorescent fixtures, plus a few smaller recessed fixtures scattered around. I had my gratings with me because I always have my gratings with me.

This was the first time I had pointed the gratings at cool fluorescent light rather than warm tungsten. The results were striking.

Where the bathroom bulb produced concentric ring halos (because the bulb was round), the fluorescent fixtures produced concentric square halos (because the fixtures were rectangular). The grating preserves the geometry of the source. This was new information.

The strongest images from this set came from the broken 100 and the 300:

• The broken 100 produced a constellation of overlapping square light sources, each one wrapped in its own crisp rainbow halo, floating in dark space. The composition reads almost like an architectural study. Nothing like the warm bathroom output.

• The 300 produced a cinematic triptych — three horizontal panels of bright light, each one with a vertical spectral spine running through the center. Clean, composed, intentional. I almost didn't take this photograph. It came at the end, after I thought I was finished. I like it so much I tried a different angle, and I'm not sure which I find more interesting:

I don't know yet what I am going to do with these waiting room photographs. Some of them may become pieces. Some of them are documentation. I didn't even go into that room expecting to find something to point my gratings at- I've learned this practice has become sort of a stress reliever for me. Nervous? No problem, let's find a light doing something interesting.

What I am learning.

After two rounds of testing, the pattern is starting to clarify. Each grating has its own physical behavior — that part is consistent. But the aesthetic outcome depends on three things together:

1. The grating (line count, condition, micro-fractures)
2. The light source (warm or cool, point or panel, round or square)
3. The receiving environment (wall texture, color, distance, geometry)

Change any one of those variables and the photograph changes. The grating isn't a filter. The grating is a partner. It does what it does, and it is in conversation with everything else in the room.

The broken 100 remains my voice. But it is starting to feel less like a single voice and more like a vocabulary — one that adapts to whatever room it is in. Which means the practice might be bigger than the instrument. The practice is me, the grating, and the room, all together.

That feels right.

— Cassie