In late July, I dropped by Taipei Spot to see Let the Wind Carry Me, a documentary about cinematographer Mark Lee. I expected that the Friday morning matinee I saw, the film's last screening at the cinema, would be deserted. Instead, the line for tickets snaked outside the building and the theater was packed. In any case, the warm, intimate film didn't disappoint.

Its depiction of Lee's lighting sense was particularly illuminating.

Lee says that while shooting 1985's Run Away (for which he won the Best Cinematography award at the 30th Asia-Pacific Film Festival), he began to enjoy depicting layers of shadow and the details within them. He says he realized that there was a flavor to shadow, that there were shadows within shadows, and that layering them had a powerful dramatic effect.

Lee went on to work with director Hou Hsiao-hsien many times. He found it to be an extraordinary challenge to excavate the depths of shadows when working for a director so sensitive to and averse to light that he rarely used more than a 200-watt bulb.

For example, in Flowers of Shanghai, which was set in the electric-lightless early years of the Republic, he used oil lamps to light tables, the reflections of which illuminated the actors' faces and clothing. This made the actors, who were draped in silk, glimmer in the faint light. The dim, flickering lamplight, and the changing expressions and inner turmoil of the characters, sucked audiences into the film's emotional black hole.

This poet in light also claims that his cameras don't just shoot people and stories. Instead, the allure of his camerawork arises from its use of empty spaces and moods, the joy of a chance encounter with the wind, the play of light on mountain forests, shots of the passing shadow of a train (rather the train itself)....

Turning to this month's cover story, where cinematographers working in 2D employ all their senses to shoot a scene, 3D is almost exclusively visual. Images are shot for and displayed to each eye, then assembled into a 3D scene in the viewer's mind.

Put that way, it sounds as if 3D is doing something akin to breaking a beautiful woman down into her constituent bits, then piecing her together again. Though she gets reassembled, she loses that certain something that made her beautiful in the first place.

Recent reports indicate that mainland Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang is making a 3D Blu-Ray of his own. Fans wearing special glasses will, with the help of high-end home-entertainment systems, be able to see Lang Lang "leap out of the screen" and play right before their eyes. As someone who has to close her eyes to get the most out of music, this sounds like a very strange way to appreciate a musical performance.

The reports stated that Lang Lang had to play the same piece through four times running and record for eight hours to get all the camera angles the producers wanted. I can't help but wonder how musical that fourth performance was.

Images do, of course, have their allure. I thumbed through a number of books for our piece on the supposed 2012 apocalypse and was surprised to learn that Avatar's remarkable 3D perfection has made it a spiritual guide to some, opening their eyes to humanity's place in the universe.

Will audiences continue to respond so strongly once the use of 3D to place them in a scene goes mainstream? Will we get used to having all our entertainment in 3D and lose something of our ability to convert 2D to 3D in our heads? Would such a loss make 2D films seem unbearably flat?

There are a lot of ways to look at the world, and we should understand how others manipulate what we see. Grasping both the surface and the substance opens up the mind's eye.