Even as a child, I've always been fascinated by light itself. Like movie music, we tend not to think directly about it but rather how it indirectly affects our perception of things. But light has its own physicality – its own dimensionality. The challenge is not just seeing this in my own eyes but finding visualizations that make this idea tangible to others in a photograph.

This photo of the Shallow Coral Reef exhibition at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco was taken on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. The image will be best appreciated on a bright screen. The pool of water and coral is highly illuminated by specialized lamps that re-produce the effect of strong full-spectrum tropical sunlight on the reef. But something about that intense illumination seems to bring out just that physicality and layering of the light in the shallow depths of the water and coral. The light doesn't seem to be reflected on the surface, but passing through the layers of water.

The image is mysterious and dynamic, and I did nothing more than slightly crop some "excess coral edges" to help direct attention to the layers of light. In this artificial environment just as in nature, the sun told me what to look at.