Seventeenth-century Holland is a lesson every photographer should learn before the first trip out: the painters there learned to draw with light as no one had before. Rembrandt pulled faces out of darkness with a single stream of glow.
I love their honesty: Vermeer painted the silence of a room so that you can still hear it today; Ruisdael — a sky taking three quarters of the canvas, being all the weather of the world; and Steen — the laughter of a tavern where no one pretends to be better than they are.
When I set a frame at dawn and wait for the light to walk into the scene by itself, I work by exactly their method: a dark background, one stream of light, and the truth about what is inside.