sea nerd blog — the flexibility of reflection

My photography is full of reflection. These shots fascinate me, the way the real world contains very unreal images. Of course, them being supposédly unreal is really just a reflection of our poor understanding of what is real.

The thing is, though, reflection shots are actually immensely flexible. With time and patience you can get almost anything you want. I’m willing to bet that if you sat on the bank of a Dutch canal, in good light, with a reflection of a metallic window frame lined up, and took a shot a second for a few hours, you could find any simple outline you wanted in the resultant mass of photos. This technique offers a way around the great restriction on photography, that if it ain’t there you can’t shoot it.

There’s a different kind of great flexibility on reflection shots among modernist forests, such as La Défense. If you zoom in to a reflection in a window a great distance away, maybe as much as a kilometre, and just move, no more than a twitch, that image changes markédly. The change is much greater than the corresponding miniscule change in perspective on the building itself. This shows me what a vast range of images are available for photography for those with time, patience, and twitch.

I wish I had that time to make those explorations.

ancient front