Tide Pools: The Small Seas Left Behind
Twice a day the ocean pulls back and forgets a few pockets of itself in the rock.
When the tide goes out it does not take everything. In the hollows of the rock it leaves shallow bowls of water, each one a small sea with its own coastline and its own weather, held flat and still. For a few hours these pools belong to nobody, filling slowly with reflected sky until the next wave comes to claim them back.
Look straight down into one and the surface becomes a lens. Tilt your head and it turns into a mirror. A photographer learns to work in the seam between the two: a polariser cuts the glare so the anemones and green weed underneath show through, or you leave the glare in place and shoot the clouds lying on the water instead. The rock is patient; the light is not.
What earns a tide pool a place on a screen is its scale. It is the whole ocean shrunk down to something you could cup in your hands, with reflection, depth, small lives and the slow tide of light across a wet surface. As a wallpaper it holds still in the way the real ones never quite manage, a calm patch of coast that stays put between waves.
