Disturbing the Aether

The aether is the medium in which light travels. Modern physics knows that light requires no medium but that does not change our day to day experience. While light can travel in a vacuum, we do not live in one. The the vast majority of the light we see has through air, water, glass or some other transparent medium. This blog is about the art of manipulating that medium with the goal of creating beautiful or illustrative photographs. In particular the phenomena we will examine are the reflections and refractions which result as light travels through changing media with differing refractive indices.