Thoughts, Opinions and Whatever from Hawai’i Published 2009–2012

Thom’s Place 4 Well Whatever…TP4WW

From Hawai’i — my thoughts and opinions on whatever I want to talk about.

Palms and a volcanic ridge mirrored in shallow water on wet sand
Palms and a volcanic ridge mirrored in shallow water on wet sand.

Weekend Reflections

One rule: the photograph must contain a reflection. That was enough to keep a meme running for well over a hundred weeks, and this blog played most of them.

Weekend Reflections was the most consistently played photo meme on TP4WW. Entries here reached at least number 105, which puts the run somewhere past two years. The rule never changed and never needed to.

The rule

  • Post a photograph containing a reflection.
  • Water, glass, chrome, a puddle, a wet street, a shop window, a pair of sunglasses, a polished table — anything reflective counts.
  • Link it on the weekly list.
  • Visit the others and say something.

No theme beyond the reflection. No judging. No week where you had to interpret a prompt. If you had a camera and it rained, you had an entry.

Why one constraint beats a topic

A themed photo meme — this week: red; this week: doors — runs out. Either the theme has nothing in your neighbourhood or you have already photographed the only good example of it. A single permanent constraint works the other way round: it changes how you look at everywhere you already are.

Anyone who played this for a few months will recognise the effect. You start noticing that the harbour flattens out at a particular hour, that the office tower opposite catches the mountain at the end of the afternoon, that a puddle after a shower is the only chance you get to photograph the top of a building and the sky underneath it at once. The meme did not ask you to travel. It asked you to look down more often.

Technically it is also a real subject rather than a gimmick. Reflected light is polarised, which is why a filter can turn a window from a mirror into a view and back again with a twist of the wrist; the same physics is why the sea goes glassy from one angle and opaque from another. If you want the actual explanation rather than the folklore, the NASA learning resources cover light and reflection properly, and NOAA’s ocean facts explain why water behaves as it does at different angles and states.

Reflections in this particular place

Playing a reflection meme from O’ahu is playing on easy mode and everybody knew it. Wet sand at low tide behaves like a mirror the length of a beach. There is standing water most weeks somewhere. The harbour, the hotel glass along Kalakaua, the chrome on the buses, rain on a lanai rail before it has run off — the island supplies material continuously and asks nothing in return.

What a decade of amateur photo memes was quietly doing

Taken one week at a time, a reflection meme is a pleasant nothing. Taken as a whole, the photo memes of 2008 to 2012 amount to one of the larger informal photographic education programmes there has ever been.

Consider what a participant was doing without ever calling it study. They were shooting to a brief, weekly, for years. They were publishing every result, good and bad, to an audience that responded. They were looking closely at thirty other people’s attempts at the identical problem, every single week, and being expected to say something specific about each one. And they were doing all of it at a moment when digital cameras had just become cheap enough that the marginal cost of a frame was nothing, so experimenting cost only attention.

No course does that. Most courses cannot, because the expensive part — a reliable audience giving you specific feedback on a weekly deadline — is exactly what an institution struggles to supply and what a blog ring supplied for free as a side effect of being sociable.

You can see the improvement curve in the archives of almost anyone who stuck with it. The week-one entries are snapshots. The week-hundred entries are photographs. Nobody set out to teach anybody anything, and a very large number of hobbyists got substantially better at seeing.

The weekly entries themselves were not captured by the archive; links to individual weeks arrive on this page instead. What survives is the shape of the thing, alongside the other weekend features the blog ran — Scenic Sunday, Small World Saturday and Faces of the Week — and the two memes hosted here rather than played, The Muffed Target and Portrait of Words.

Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou