Light Through the Mirror — Frames

Blue hour

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Photographers call it the blue hour and then argue about how long it lasts. In Milan in January it is twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, between the moment the sun is properly gone and the moment the sky stops mattering. The streetlights are on but haven't won yet. Windows go warm. Everything blue deepens, and everything artificial floats on top of it like brushwork.

These frames are from a week of walking the same kilometre of the Naviglio at the same twenty minutes, which is the closest thing I have to a discipline. Same route, same lens, no exceptions for weather. The constraint is the point: when you can't choose the subject, you start actually seeing the light, which was the subject all along.

A note on these images: the studies shown here are procedural placeholders, generated from this post's own shade of the section palette, standing in until the scans come back.

Tide tables

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 GMT

The tide on the Adriatic is small — half a metre on a good day — and almost nobody watches it. That September I decided to be the person who watches it. I pinned the tide table above the desk in the rented room and let it schedule me: one frame at low water, one at the turn, one at high.

Low water is the honest hour. The sea pulls back and shows its working — the mussel ropes, the dark stones, the old men who appear with buckets as if summoned. Everything smells stronger. The light comes in flat and long and lies across the wet sand like it is resting.

The turn is the strange one. For about twenty minutes nothing moves, and the water holds a stillness you can photograph but not quite describe — a held breath with a horizon in it. I missed it twice by getting coffee. The tide table does not wait for coffee.

High water arrives in the evening like furniture being put back. The beach shortens, the colours go deep, the day's evidence is filed away under half a metre of sea. I shot the last frame and walked back up the lane, and the tide, having no further need of me, carried on.

The studies shown are procedural placeholders in this post's shade, holding the layout until the scans arrive.

Analog summer

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 12:00:00 GMT

This summer I put the digital body in a drawer and carried my father's old rangefinder and three rolls of film. One hundred and eight exposures for eight weeks. The arithmetic changes everything: at two frames a day you stop collecting pictures and start spending them.

The first roll taught me how much I had been leaning on the delete button — not as a tool but as a licence not to look before shooting. The second roll taught me patience with my own seeing: half of it was shot in the same courtyard, at the same hour, because the light there earned it. The third roll I barely remember shooting, which I've decided is what fluency feels like.

The scans came back in September like letters from a slightly better photographer. Not technically better — there are missed focuses here that a phone would never permit — but better at choosing. Thirty-six chances make you a critic before the shutter instead of after.

Studies shown are procedural placeholders in this post's shade until the scans are prepared for the web.