I don't know if this is technically a rock pool, not being the sea. But at Greenwich when the tide is very low the furthest shoreline surface is actually solid rock and concrete. It looks like mucky mud, I've always hestitated to walk out to it in my usual boots but ventured out for the photo today and was surprised it was solid!
So the pools of water sit until waves splash back up, but the water is quite calm today.
Wave Mechanics
365 day photo project of the River Thames in London
Archive for 2008
Day 22: Rock pool
Day 21: Tide going out
Just another day in my usual Greenwich spot. The tide is moving out and you can catch odd lighter lines in the moving water showing the movement outwards. I've always liked this effect but don't know how or why it happens. I'm guessing it's actually surface bubbles or debris being dragged by the direction of the waves.
Day 20: Night flash
Day 19: Low tide with sand
Day 18: Blackfriars again
Day 17: Sun! Glorious sun!
Haven't seen it in at least a week and today the sky is blue and the sun is out! So despite getting some nice photos of footprints in the sand (the river banks are sand by Blackfriars Bridge and it's low tide right now) I just had to go with something blue and cheerful.
Fairly calm day but as I'm in central London for this photo there's a tiny bit of choppiness from boat traffic.
Day 16: (late!) River wall
Thought I'd show you a bit of that river wall I keep mentioning. This is actually just a bit of it on the side of the steps I sometimes am photographing from. Still high tide so not much wall visible, but I love the telltale algae build-up.
A calm slightly hazy day, so calm water just lapping at the sides.
Sorry this was a bit late. I was up late last night getting my podcast done (StudioWaves, listen here!) and updated this to Flickr but forgot about the blog. Oops!
Day 15: night levels
15/12/08: Another night shot - forget to go in daylight! Colour is completely arficial - result of the auto-levels in Photoshop. No other editing - it amazes me the data that is actually in the photo despite it looking completely black straight from the camera. (Light reflected is from the O2 Dome.)
Day 14: Turbulence
Looking down along the river wall the high tide was moving along the wall and between pillars of piers. I wanted to capture the way the water was moving two directions due to posts under the water surface, and the black 'hole' near the center is the start of a little whirlpool. The water is then moving away from that area in both directions, producing the two wave lines.
Day 13: Splash!
Day 12: Barely there
Day 11: Conspiracy
Yesterday morning, in an evil plot concocted by the Cylons and Ferengi, the Thames river was stolen. To what end, it's not clear. Fortunately by 00:01GMT today the river was returned to its rightful place in the spacetime continuum by a mysterious man in a long military coat. (Rumours of the name "Jack" have been heard, but cannot be confirmed.) Those who say they saw the river yesterday were actually just subject to a hynotic mass delusion.
Needless to say it was impossible for me to take a photograph of the missing river.
Day 10: Cruise boat reflections
My first night photo, inspired by Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark blog who pointed out basically that I had no excuse for missing a photo - I could do night shots.
This is the reflections of lights from one of the cruise boats that commutes back and forth between Greenwich Pier and the Dome.
Day 9: So cold!
Day 8: Muddy low tide
I just couldn't resist bringing in the image to the shore a bit today. I managed to go out to the river at the lowest tide time and there was just all that lovely stretch of mud and stones. A very low tide, but not a spring tide (moon is about 3/4). ('Spring tide' is a tide with the greatest difference between low and high water levels in a cycle, nothing to do with the season.)
Welcome! Day 1
Welcome to Wave Mechanics! A blog sharing my project of 365 photos of the River Thames in London. A lot of artists have been doing 365 projects, a task of taking a photo a day for a year, and I wanted to do something interesting, accessible (it's a 5 minute walk to the river for me), and relevent to the rest of my artwork.
The water surface of the Thames is the perfect ever-changing subject matter.
You can also see the whole series on my Wave Mechanics set Flickr page, in case you want to access previous images more easily.
An added note: while I will be publishing these images in future I would still like to share them under Creative Commons for others to use as source material. I thought it might be particularly useful for artists trying to capture waves and ripples, or water patterns and reflections generally. So please do use the images under the attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license. [Nitty gritty: this means you can use the image for non-commercial activities (blog, artwork studies or as part of a larger artwork) and I just ask that you mention me as the original artist. You can even alter the image, as long as you do the same thing and attribute the original to me so more people can enjoy the 365 series! You don't need to ask permission, I trust you.]
Thames 365 by Tina Mammoser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.