Vintage lighting for stage most literally includes all of the lighting techniques used by the first theatrical producers. Naturally, the very first theatrical lighting used by early performers was simple, natural sunlight.
Plays and musical programs were often performed at particular times of the day in order to take advantage of the quality of light available at certain times of the day.
After vintage natural sunlight came candles, lime lighting and different types of gas powered lighting systems. During the era of gas powered theatrical lighting, many theaters burned down and people died in theater fires. Gas lighting systems often involved huge and complex under-stage gas piping configurations.
The innovation of the incandescent light in the late 1800s was a huge development in lighting for the stage as well as the home. This invention allowed for the development of a safe, small and affordable lighting solution that can easily be placed anywhere that additional lighting is needed.
Vintage stage lighting continued to develop into the 1990s and particular parallel lighting industries started to evolve. Many of these industries borrowed from basic ideas and principles of stage lighting design. Modern fields of display, film and television lighting design and photographic lighting design have each developed and evolved from the fundamental roots of the first stage lighting design.
Vintage lighting can also be used to refer to particular styles of lighting that are particularly popular, such as Tiffany lamps or other traditional pieces that have been reproduced either directly or in subtle styling time and again.
The objectives of lighting, whether vintage or modern, is to create a sense of visibility, naturalism, mood and composition. These were some of the first well followed principles of vintage stage lighting proposed by Stanley McCandless.
'A Syllabus of Stage Lighting' by Mr. McCandless was one of the most comprehensive texts on stage lighting, that also discusses the more artistic aspects of stage lighting.
Throughout this text on stage lighting, McCandless uses the term 'visibility' to be the most basic and fundamental function of stage lighting, because what is clearly seen is understood or accepted; what is presented as less visible is also marginally important.
Composition refers to the overall aspect of the stage pictorially, as is influenced by the stage lighting. Composition tends also to deal with he form of objects. Thus, a scene may be broadcast with a soft, even light to reveal every object equally, or may be lit with a sharp localized light on the active portions of the scene only.
Naturalism is used to refer to the process or function of establishing a sense of place and/or time in a given scene or sequence of events in a theatrical performance.
The term 'mood' is used to refer to basic psychological modes and circuitry of the audience in general. A specific mood can be affected when the proper lighting elements, props and other factors are aligned in a particular way.
