# Set 1 critique (read as pictures first, captions second)

Read by the orchestrating assistant. Images: set1/contact.png (drawings), contact_studies.png (value studies).

## Repeated habits (mine and the tools')
1. A hard horizontal band: where a wall meets the table (1, 5, 6) Hands fills the dark plane as a flat rectangle with a ruled lower edge. The band is the most assertive shape in three of six, and none of them asked for it.
2. Objects in a row: 1, 4 and 6 line the objects up across the frame at even intervals, and 3 lines them on a diagonal. I replaced Midjourney's pyramid with a frieze: a different default, still a default.
3. The lit side of a white cup becomes paper and the cup loses its contour (1, 6). The cup is legible only through its darks: interior, handle, shadow side.
4. All six are seen from a fixed, centred camera; only 3 crops an object.

## Promising relationships (pointing to what is visible)
- 3: the cup's dark interior, its cast shadow and the handle form one dark shape; each apple is a light crescent on its own dark oval. The three objects rhyme as "a light rim around a dark", and the cup's dark is inside it while the apples' darks are outside them. Visible without the caption.
- 2: the cup is reduced to a light chip and a sliver of rim above the apple's contour. The apple's mass and the cup's small notch make a scale relation the default never has (the default renders each object to the same degree).
- 4: three dark shapes on a light ground, and their shadows run toward us and merge into one floor of dark. The shared shadow that 1 was meant to show happens here instead. The handle's opening is the only light inside the dark row.

## Ideas that work only because the caption explains them
- 1 ("bound by a shadow"): without the caption it is a dark bar with two small marks at its ends; the cup cannot be read. Fails.
- 6 ("an event"): the cup on its side does not read as a cup (the stage's tilted-cup geometry is wrong: a tool fault), and the apple meant to be leaving the frame is out of it entirely. Fails; the idea was not tested.
- 5 ("near-absence in a dark field"): the field reads as a flat dark block with a notch, not as darkness in a space; the objects are tiny but readable. The idea depends on the caption.

## Decisions
- 3: carry. It is the favourite, so set 2 must include its strongest counterexample.
- 2: carry (concealment and scale).
- 4: carry (silhouette, merged shadow); test against ordinary side light.
- 1: drop. Its intended relation appeared, unasked, in 4.
- 5: hold in reserve; the dark-field idea is not dead, the wall-band rendering is.
- 6: drop for now; the tilted cup needs a fix in hand/scene.py before it can be tested.

## Set 2 plan (six)
2-1 develop 3: closer; one apple only, its shadow touching the cup's shadow.
2-2 counterexample to 3: the same scene with the cup replaced by a solid of similar size (no hollow). If the hollow is what makes 3 specific, 2-2 loses it.
2-3 counterexample to 3: light moved so one apple takes the light and the cup sits in shadow (change which object receives attention).
2-4 develop 2: lower and closer; the apple fills half the frame; the cup only as a rim arc and its shadow; a darker ground.
2-5 develop 4: break the frieze: overlap in depth, shadows toward us, the handle's opening the only light inside the dark mass.
2-6 counterexample to 4: the same placement as 2-5, lit from the side.