Low Water

The tide chart put low water at 00:14, close enough to the winter solstice that the night was the longest of the year and there was no hurry to finish before the sky began to change. At full ebb the water pulls back far enough to expose a wide flat of wet sand, which reflects light in thin horizontal bands instead of the single column a deeper harbor gives.

I kept an old jetty in the frame on purpose. Everything else in the room avoids built structures, but this one plate needed a fixed vertical to hold against all that horizontal light, and the jetty's pilings, black against the flats, do exactly that. Without them the plate reads as pure atmosphere; with them it reads as a place.

tide low   00:14
start      23:50
close      00:38
air        -2C, still
notes      flats fully exposed by 00:05, frost forming
      on pilings by close

The moon on this plate is close to its brightest without yet being full — waxing gibbous, the fourth mark in the sequence. It is a very different water from Tide Glass, the first plate hung, though both were made under the same slack-tide rule.