The Ginko trees make pools of yellow everywhere on campus, from the parking lots behind student dorms, to the small copses between departments. As the day is grey lit and damp, and Heathrow borne planes roar past overhead, invisible through the cloud, the pools of colour are welcome.

Later in the afternoon, Soph and I compare 'lighting gell' colours on a role of about 200 samples, ranging from fluorescent magenta to eggshell yellow. The colours come with short descriptions of their intensities and transparencies. Soph asks me to hold up the small rectangular transparent samples against a black and white photograph in a book on my desk, the better to compare how the colour enhances or mutes the detail in the image. It is difficult to make a choice of colour when only one of us can actually see the physical 'gell'. We end up choosing a green called 'half plus green', which is a more transparent version of a green called 'plus green'. Hovering between a bright green and a lemony mint, and around 80% transparent, the green film adds a beautiful intensity to grayscale text and imagery.

As I leave campus at 5:30 it is almost pitch black. Students in hooded sweaters walk past in small groups, dorm kitchens are brightly illuminated, and rows of liquor bottles balance precariously on window ledges. As I pass the parking lot into the deep dark of the woods at the bottom of campus, a Ginko leaf catches my attention- it is fanned out against the asphalt, an opaque yellow through which dark textures permeate.