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Studio photographers have the advantage of being able to move props and lights around until they get the effects they want. If you mostly shoot landscapes, as I do, there is no moving rocks and trees around, and the lights follow their own path in the heavens. This does not mean you must always take things as you find them. But if you want to achieve certain natural lighting effects, you need to wait until the light moves to where you want it. To say that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west tells you very little. Where I live in New England, the sunrise moves in a 64-degree arc along the horizon from the winter solstice to the summer solstice. If you are shooting close by, you may already have a good sense of when and where the sun will rise and set. But if you are venturing farther afield, you might need to consult an ephemeris.
An ephemeris was originally a chart giving the positions of the sun, moon and planets for any time of day at a given location. Computers now do this automatically, and there is even an app for photographers that plots this information on Google Maps for any location in the world. As an example, I recently wanted to photograph a frozen waterfall after a long stretch of sub-zero weather. The waterfall was located in a state park about 40 minutes from my home. I had been there before but not for many years. The photographer’s app gave me a Google map of the site with an overlay showing the times and directions of the rising and setting sun. There was even an overlay showing the sun within six degrees of the horizon at dawn and dusk, a time of day when the light is generally considered most favorable for outdoor photographs. Armed with this information, I had a pretty good idea when the lighting conditions would be most favorable for my shoot without having to scout out the site beforehand.
Let’s say you have an assignment from National Geographic to photograph the sun rising over the Heel Stone at England’s Stonehenge monument on Salisbury Plain. You could consult the ephemeris app. Or, if you had done your homework on Stonehenge, you would already know that the sun comes up over the Heel Stone each year at the summer solstice when viewed from the center of the monument. It turns out that Stonehenge itself is a kind of ephemeris, with its massive stone megaliths aligned to the positions of the sun and moon at certain junctures. Boston University astronomer Gerald Hawkins determined in the 1960s that various alignments of the megaliths pointed to solstices, eclipses and equinoxes. Hawkins’ findings were initially challenged by archeologists who doubted that the Neolithic peoples who erected Stonehenge in stages over 1,000 years had the knowledge to build a sophisticated astronomical observatory. Yet somehow people who lacked even such basic technology as the wheel were able to drag 40-ton stone slabs 25 miles across Salisbury Plain and precisely align them to the movements of celestial bodies.
It has since been determined that other megalithic sites in Britain are oriented toward the sun and moon. Evidence of similar directional orientation goes back much further. Excavations of Neanderthal settlements have found that dwellings, ritual sites and graves all faced toward the rising sun. From the time Christians first emerged from the catacombs, they built their places of worship in “high and open places, facing the light,” in the words of Tertullian, one of the early church fathers. This led many pagan onlookers to conclude that Christians must be sun worshippers. Reinforcing this notion was the fact that priests were instructed to celebrate the Mass facing ad orientem (toward the east).
Various explanations are offered for why Christian churches and rituals are directed toward the east. Many churches were built on earlier pagan religious sites, which faced east. Jesus was identified in the New Testament with the Jewish high priest who performed sacrifices facing east at the temple in Jerusalem. The rising of the sun in the east is symbolically associated with Christ’s Resurrection and the Second Coming. As for the directional orientation of Stonehenge, its Neolithic builders left behind no written records that might have explained its significance. Was Stonehenge an astronomical observatory, a religious shrine or both? Priests doubled as astronomers among the Babylonians and other ancient civilizations. In the end, whatever the rationale, I suspect we align our shrines as we do for the same reason that photographers point their cameras as they do, to revel in the light.
The Photographer’s Ephemeris (http://photoephemeris.com)
Gerald Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded (1965)
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