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.

So on the last three mornings of the project I set up a second camera next to the first and recorded short clips at a normal shutter speed while the long exposures ran. Same position, same lens, same hour. The loop above is a few seconds from one of those mornings, slowed slightly and trimmed so it repeats cleanly.

Why a loop

I tried longer cuts with sound, and they became something else — a nature film, a mood piece, the kind of video that plays in the background of a shop. The loop is closer to the photographs. It doesn’t go anywhere. It asks you to look at one part of the frame for a while and notice that it isn’t quite the same each time around.

It also keeps the files small and the page quiet. There is no player, no controls, no sound: just the movement, on repeat, until you scroll past.

How it was made

  • Camera on a second tripod a metre to the left of the stills camera.
  • 35 mm lens, a little stopped down, shutter at twice the frame rate.
  • A six-stop filter so I could keep the aperture where I wanted it without overexposing the sky.
  • Exposure locked, focus locked, white balance set to match the stills.

In editing I did very little: a slight crop to match the framing of the stills, a gentle reduction in speed, and a cross-fade at the loop point so the seam doesn’t jump. The colour is the same as the photographs because it is the same light.

What it changed

Watching the clip next to the long exposures was useful in a way I didn’t expect. The band of warm light in the water that appears in most of the stills is visible in the clip too, but it flickers: it is made of hundreds of small reflections that come and go. The long exposure averages them into a smooth glow. Seeing both side by side made it easier to explain to people why the photographs look the way they do — and, honestly, easier to explain it to myself.

If you have reduced motion turned on in your system settings, the page shows a still frame instead of the loop.