Water Caustics, Located

Handheld tilt-up, 28mm at f/2.8, a small indoor swimming pool with a low concrete ceiling and one high window camera left. A chipped tiled ledge and a coiled blue hose sit soft in the near foreground. A swimmer's arms break the surface; the reflected caustic net appears only on the strip of ceiling directly opposite the window's light path — a bright rippling parallelogram roughly the shape of the window, wandering and re-knitting as the surface moves. The rest of the ceiling, the far wall, and the swimmer's own body carry no ripple pattern at all. Grout stained, paint blistered with damp, a rust weep under the window frame. Greig Fraser's hard-source naturalism with deep unlifted shadows. The operator's breath shows in the slow vertical drift as the tilt lands. Visible focus breathing as the caustics come sharp.