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.

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.

By Greenwich pier in the evening, after some shopping! It was dark but the high tide meant I could photograph pretty close to the water surface over the railing. I let the auto-flash have a try and liked the reflection of flash off the ripples of water.

Sandy part of the shore, as opposed to the rocks and rubbish by my usual photo spot! So another low tide when I was photographing meant I could capture the footprints of a mysterious Londoner and her dog.

Another guest spot by the river at Blackfriars (Gabriel's Wharf to be exact, I was working in Skylark Gallery today).

A bit blah day, we did have patches of sun but not when I took my photo. Tide was out somewhat so had water lapping at the sand and debris.

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.

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!

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.)

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.

I missed the rain, shame, but it's a very high tide today (full moon) with heavy rolling waves. Nothing major but you can just feel the weight of the water in them. So here's a splash against the river wall.

Got out to the river around dusk and only with extreme Photoshop adjustments did I get anything other than a black square.

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.

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.

Yikes was it freezing out this morning! I decided to get straight out of bed and go do my photo this morning. A windy cold day, so there were nice flowing waves on the surface. Sunny and bright, but the colour actually changed immediately from blue to green grey as cloud blew over.

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 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.