Working with Triggers
Staying Calm in a Chaotic World
What is a Trigger?
A trigger is an internal reaction to an external energy, action, feeling, or incident that — once introduced to the body — can highjack and temporarily overtake the emotional, nervous, and mental systems. While in a triggered state, we may feel uneasy, anxious, overwhelmed, or not safe. We may lose our sense of self and temporarily get caught up in the trigger.
A trigger is an internal reaction to an external energy, action, feeling, or incident that — once introduced to the body — can highjack and temporarily overtake the emotional, nervous, and mental systems. While in a triggered state, we may feel uneasy, anxious, overwhelmed, or not safe. We may lose our sense of self and temporarily get caught up in the trigger.
1
Stop. Acknowledge the trigger.
Admit you are triggered, and allow it. Do not push it aside, or try to ignore it, because it will continue to act out in your nervous system. Stop. Acknowledge the trigger and bring awareness to how your nerves and emotions are doing. Recognizing the trigger will help you to understand your body behavior better. By allowing the trigger, we don't repress its energy and what it is expressing to us about our needs, worries, and fears.
2
Listen to your body.
When in a triggered state, we can lose touch with our bodies and be overly focused on circumstances outside of ourselves. Bodies are amazing creations. They hold tension, creativity, patterns, intelligence and emotions — and all this information and energy runs through the nervous system. When we are in touch with our bodies, we are in touch with ourselves.
When a photographer puts the sun behind an object its role in the lighting strategy changes from modeling the front of the object to one of defining its outline and creating the impression of physical separation and 3D space a frontally illuminated scene lacks.
Steve Jobs
Apple CEO
1818 Magazine by Stephanie Toole
To differentiate that role from that of "key" modeling when a modeling source moves behind the object it is typically called a "rim" or "accent" light. In portrait lighting it also called a "hair" light because it is used to create the appearance of physical separation between the subject's head and background.
3
Creating Natural Looking Artificial Lighting
A typical studio lighting configuration will consist of a fill source to control shadow tone, a single frontal key light to create the highlight modeling clues on the front of object facing the camera over the shadows the fill illuminates, one or more rim/accent lights to create separation between foreground and background, and one or more background lights to control the tone of the background and separation between it and the foreground.
There are two significant differences between natural lighting and artificial sources. One is the character of the fill and the other is more rapid fall-off in intensity. In nature skylight fill is omni-directional and usually brighter from above. That "wrap around" characteristic is difficult to duplicate with a directional artificial source.
