Just This Side of Captivating By Sean Ripple www.flickr.com/photos/flatlife It’s Tuesday morning. I’ve come to work earlier than usual. The silence on the floor is suite-wide. I decide to use the quiet time to photograph my reflection on a window in the office. It’s still dark out. I’m an impressionistic visage of a ghost among the other reflections of paintings and chairs and tables and doors and walls and telephones. The blinds on the windows chop the reflections into measured sections, and a stream of car lights and traffic signals down below crowd the image from the opposing side of the glass. The exposure setting I use fails to capture clearly the scene my eyes see and my words attempt to describe. I adjust the exposure settings, snapping a few more pictures, but I am no more successful than I was initially. I move to another room and take a couple more photographs, which are passable, but I know I haven’t grabbed an image that represents the fullness of the visual impression. The Earth rotates, and the sun’s light appears, erasing the scene I was trying to document. I process the new day light, which is traveling 186,000 miles per second, yet I could not transcribe the ghostly reality of my early morning onto photographic technology in a captivating manner.