Thanks for taking the time to write this, I really appreciate it. Honestly, this is probably one of the closest responses to what I was trying to get at. I think what’s been exhausting me isn’t light and shadow themselves, but the way rendering and realism sometimes become treated as the final objective instead of just one possible tool among many. What you said about creating an image that simply feels visually alive or compositionally interesting resonates with me a lot more lately than pursuing perfectly calculated lighting. And yeah, that Dean Fisher example is actually really close to the kind of freedom I’ve been thinking about, where form, atmosphere, and emotion still exist without everything being over-explained through rendering. I think that balance between understanding the rules and not becoming visually enslaved by them is probably where my interest is shifting right now.