Overexposure

More light than the image can hold: highlights bleach, detail burns away. Ruin usually, radiance when chosen.

Overexposure clips at the top: the window becomes white void, the sky loses its clouds, and no grade can recover what the sensor never kept. As an accident it is the least forgivable exposure error, because digital highlights die abruptly and permanently, without film's gentle shoulder.

Chosen, it is a register of its own: the blown white of memory and heaven, interrogation-bright flashbacks, the bleached seaside of a summer that exists only in recall. The craft is aiming the burn, deciding what may bleach and what must hold, and shooting so the choice was yours. Radiance by intent, void by negligence: same histogram, different film.