And a reflection that’s lost to the continuously varying angles of rippled or choppy water (the light still reflects, but the angle changes with the moving water), magically appears as soft outline when a long exposure smoothes the water’s surface. While a crisp reflection can dominate the primary subject in an image, a splash of reflected color or shape can beautifully accent a striking primary subject.
In other words, what we know as a reflection is in fact re-reflected light (reflected first from Half Dome, then by the river).Īs spectacular as a crisp, mirror reflection in still water is, it’s easy to overlook the visual potential of a reflection that’s not crisp, or to forget your camera’s ability to render a soft or abstract reflection much better than your eyes view it. When these photons reach our eyes, we see a reflection. A few of these photons penetrate the water to illuminate detail in the submerged riverbed, while others, like a billiard ball ricocheting of the table’s cushion, carom off in the other direction but at the same angle at which they struck the water.
For example, when sunlight strikes Half Dome in Yosemite, some of the sun’s photons bounce straight back into our eyes, and there it is.īut other photons head off at different angles-some to be captured by other sets of eyes, while others land on the surface of the Merced River far below. Without getting too far into the physics of light, it’s important to understand that every object we see and photograph that doesn’t generate its own light comes to us courtesy of reflected light. Water reflections come in many forms, from a mirror-sharp inverted mountain peak shimmering in a still pool, to an abstract shuffle of color and texture on a gently undulating lake. Just as we freeze or blur a waterfall to express turbulent motion, we can include a reflection to convey serenity. Water’s universal familiarity makes it an ideal subject for photographers frustrated by their camera’s static representation of our dynamic world. Reflections are a powerful photographic tool as well. Rather than processing the scene directly, our brains reassemble the reflection’s reverse world, and in the process perhaps see the scene a little differently. Who doesn’t love the soothing tranquility of a crisp reflection? And like a metaphor in writing, a reflection is an indirect representation that can be more powerful than its literal double thanks to its ability to engage the brain in different ways than we’re accustomed. Wikipedia: The change in direction of a wavefront at an interface between two different media so that the wavefront returns into the medium from which it originated
Autumn Snow, Half Dome Reflection, Yosemiteĭ: T he return of light, heat, sound, etc., after striking a surface.
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