Reflections

Let’s reflect a bit on reflections. They’ve been a storied part of the photographic portfolio for many years. Urban planners in Washington, D.C., and around the world have long incorporated shallow bodies of water into the city landscape for the express purpose of attracting photographers.  In our nation’s capital, we have two: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the U.S. Capitol Reflecting Pool.   Opportunities abound for dramatic photos.

Here are two from either end of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, which is nearly seven football fields long (676 yards) by half a football field (56 yards) wide.

And two from the smaller, but equally dramatic Capitol Reflecting Pool (looking toward the west side of the Capitol) both shot at sunrise:

But you don’t need a specially constructed reflecting pool for good reflection-themed photographs. Any reflective surface can work.

Such as … a puddle of water. 

This shot of the west side of the Lincoln Memorial (from Parkway Drive, with the Arts of Peace sculptures just out of frame on either side of the road) is not my greatest. It’s published here to nudge your eye to look down, especially after a recent storm, to see all the new, and very temporary, reflecting pools at your feet.

Here’s a better puddle shot. I found this icy puddle one morning by the D.C. War Memorial:

You don’t even need water for a good reflection shot.  How about a window? Or here, a skylight:

Both of these shots use the skylight over the U.S. Capitol’s below-ground visitor center to show off a different view of the Capitol dome. The first is in the morning, and uses the seams framing the skylight panes as “fracture lines” suggesting political division. The other is at evening blue hour and is meant to convey a more serene mood. (The seams of the panes still can be seen, but are more subdued and less “divisive,” if that’s the right word.)

These non-watery surfaces also have the advantage of being reliably reflective most of the time. Pools of water, on the other hand, will lose their mirror-like surface once the wind gets above7 or 8 mph.

Here’s one more from the same location, with a puddle sitting on the skylight, which made for sharper focus in the middle.

Remember, any reflective surface can work.  Here is a closeup of a hubcap on a classic car, reflecting Victorian buildings in downtown Petaluma, California not long ago:

Cars are covered with reflective surfaces (windshields, hood ornaments, doors, bumpers, to name a few), just waiting for the imaginative photographer to wander by.

If you have a cooperative volunteer nearby in sunglasses, that can work too: (here, my wife Vicki Malone outside a church in Regensburg, Germany)

And as these last three shots show, you don’t need to struggle to get both the subject and its reflection into the same shot. Sometimes the reflection alone is pretty interesting, as in this building facade seen in a canal (on the island of Burano in Venice, Italy’s lagoon):

Since this is written just before Memorial Day, let’s close this post with another reflective surface, the granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington:

This one is all reflection: a sunrise sky, an alley of trees, the shaft of the Washington Monument near the golden horizon. 

You can make reflections work for your photographs. All you need is your two eyes and your imagination.  And then you’ll get the shot.