Day 126: Like a Thin Sheet of Glass

2026-06-12

Hello!

I'll first address the black circle surrounding the image. This photograph was taken with a three-second exposure time, meaning that the camera sensor was exposed to the light for three seconds, gathering all the photons and making an image. Normally, photos are taken within tiny fractions of a second to freeze motion. A long exposure blurs that motion (in this case, blurring any tiny waves in the water and preserving a clear reflection).

But loads of light makes the image bright, so I give my camera sunglasses. These sunglasses are meant for camera lenses, and they don't change the color or behavior of the light coming through. It just makes things darker. I get the benefits of smoothing out ripples and motion over a few whole seconds, with the protection against overexposed morning sunlight hitting the sensor at full blast.

These filters (called neutral density filters) don't precisely match the lens I'm using here, so you can see some of the edges of those external filters in this image here. It's not too bad, and I think it actually helps focus your eye on the center of the image and not worry about what's on the edge being cut off. The filters become my vignette and image margin.

Three seconds isn't that long, though — I've got images in my camera roll that have blurred thirty seconds of motion — so the water has to be still in the first place. That was the case with this small lake of still water. It really did look almost like glass in real life, and I helped show the effect through a bit of camera trickery.

In the early morning, when I was the only one out to photograph this landscape without any disturbing car traffic behind me, there was a soothing silence as I was taking photos, only interrupted by the snapping of the shutter and some shoe shuffling on the cobblestones here and there.

And I do mean early morning. As I mentioned before, I was up before four in the morning to take photos like this. This was one of the last photos in the morning sesion, but it was still about five o' clock. Was it worth it? Well, it's more about the photos I haven't shown yet. I'm deciding on whether I should show them to the Internet in the first place...

Finally, recovering an ancestral story in Tajikistan. Alina Naza goes back to try and rediscover forgotten stories through video and film photography. Sharing these memories with her dad, she creates what I think is a wonderful bit of cinema with a great pacing between aggressively-quick and agonizingly-long. The bravery to go through death and mountains and grief and valleys (and patiently wait for cows to cross the road) and publish it for all the Internet to see is inspiring. And it's all wrapped up into film photography. What the hell.

Cheers,
David