¶This photo is one of my personal reminders of the now-old adage “The best camera is the one that's with you”, originally espoused by Chase Jarvis. I don’t always have a full body setup with me, and I don’t worry about it when I don’t because I’ve always got my mobile with me (currently an iPhone 15 Pro Max, but an iPhone 7 Plus when I made this photograph back in 2016).
¶Would I have have loved to have made this photo with a tripod and a slower shutter speed to get a little more ‘flow’ in the water? Yep. Did I let the lack of those things prevent me from capturing my idea for a shot? Nope.
¶The wall to the right provided a decent tripod-substitute and the photo turned out pretty well despite the “frozen” water droplets (they come close to resembling icicles, imo).
¶I’m publishing this photograph nearly ten years after making it. Recent news of current renovations of the Reflecting Pool prompted me to review all of my photos from the National Mall. I remembered this one before looking back on the collection and was happy when I found it. It doesn’t show the Reflecting Pool, but rather the water in the pool of the World War II Memorial. Still, for me, it conveys a memory of the understated nature of the containers for the water in both the Memorial and the Pool. Neither were swimming pool blue, or vibrant in any sense of the word. Both were…functional. They allowed the reflection to exist and refused to interfere with it.
¶I adjusted the edit to a black and white treatment, which seemed an appropriate way to use the pool of the World War II Memorial to remember the Reflecting Pool from its pre-bluification days.
¶Take the damn photo, even when you’ve only got your phone with you. You don’t know everything you’ll want to remember about the present until it becomes the past. Having a photograph in that moment of desire for memory is a wonderful feeling.