Ethan Walker — Journal

Waiting for flat light

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Why most of Low Water was made on mornings that looked, at first, like nothing at all.

For a long time I treated overcast mornings as days off. The forecast would show a grey blanket over the coast and I would stay in, answer email, sort files, tell myself I would go when there was a sunrise worth getting up for. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the pictures I kept returning to, years later, were almost never the ones with a sunrise in them.

A slow workflow for long exposures

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:30:00 +0000

The routine I follow for multi-minute exposures by the sea, from setting up to checking the file.

People sometimes ask how I get long exposures that are sharp, level and evenly exposed. The truthful answer is that I make a lot of mistakes slowly enough that I notice them. The routine below is what is left after a few years of doing that. None of it is clever; it is mostly a way of not skipping steps when my hands are cold.

Film: Low Water, moving

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

A short loop from the Low Water mornings, showing the movement the long exposures smooth away.

The stills in Low Water are all about stillness: exposures of several minutes that turn the sea into a smooth surface. But on those mornings the water was never still. It moved in long, low swells that you could hear more than see, and I started to feel that the photographs, for all that I like them, were leaving something out.

Grain is not noise

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:30:00 +0000

On leaving grain in high-ISO night pictures, and why I stopped running noise reduction by default.

When I started photographing at night, I treated noise as a defect. Every file from Concrete Hours went through noise reduction first, before anything else, because the high-ISO speckle looked like a failure of technique. The results were clean and smooth and, looking back, oddly lifeless — like photographs of models of buildings rather than buildings.

A week above the snowline

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Notes from a January week in the Alps, an inversion that refused to lift, and the series that came out of it.

I booked the week months ahead on the strength of an old memory: a hard blue sky over white ridges, the kind of day where you can see sixty kilometres. What I got was an inversion. For six of the seven days, the valley sat under a grey lid of cloud, and the ridges above it appeared and disappeared like islands.

Film: Concrete Hours at night

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 09:30:00 +0000

A short loop of a stairwell at night, a strip light, and the occasional car passing outside.

One of the locations I kept returning to for Concrete Hours was a stairwell with a long window on one side and a single strip light that never seemed quite steady. From outside, across the street, the stairwell turned into a set of grey planes, and every now and then a car passing below drew a line of red light along the bottom of the frame.

How I sequence a series

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:30:00 +0000

From several hundred frames to twelve: small prints, a long table, and a few rules I break often.

Making the pictures is maybe half of a series. The other half is deciding which ones belong, in what order, and what the order says. I find this part harder than the shooting, and for a long time I did it badly: on a screen, in a grid, with everything at the same size and all of it visible at once.

What's in the bag, roughly

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 09:30:00 +0000

The kit I actually carry, described in general terms, and why it matters less than it seems.

This is the question I get most often, and the one I find hardest to answer usefully. The equipment matters, but much less than the time of day, the patience to wait and the willingness to go back. Still, people are curious, and when I was starting out I was too. So here is what I carry, in general terms, and why.

Colour, restraint and the white point

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Why I set white balance once per morning, not once per frame, and what that does to a series.

There is a moment in every edit when a picture looks almost right and the colour seems to be the reason it isn’t. The usual fix is to adjust white balance until it looks good. I did that for years, and my series looked like collections of individually good frames that didn’t quite belong together.

Film: Fog over the lakes

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 09:30:00 +0000

A short loop of fog drifting across a still lake, made alongside the Still Water series.

This loop was the first short film I made that I was happy with, and it is the reason the others exist. It came out of a winter morning on one of the lakes from Still Water, when the fog was moving in a steady, slow drift from left to right and the far shore kept appearing and disappearing.

Dunes and the problem of scale

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:30:00 +0000

Photographing sand ripples without a horizon, and the small tricks that let a viewer find their footing.

Ripples in sand are one of the few subjects I know that look the same at every size. A field of ripples photographed from a metre away and a field of dunes photographed from a plane share the same grammar: long repeating lines, a gentle slope on one side, a steep shadowed face on the other, and occasional places where the pattern splits or bends.