📷 Empty Chair, Full Sky — Himalayan Foothills, India · 14 Sept 2026
A photograph and a story, every morning
Empty Chair, Full Sky
Himalayan Foothills, India · landscape
A wooden lounge chair sits on a teak deck beside an infinity pool that holds the sky perfectly. Beyond the pool, low hills and morning haze stretch away.
Infinity-edge pools work by tricking the eye — water spills over a hidden lip at the far edge, so that from the deck the surface of the pool looks like it merges directly into the landscape beyond it. On a still morning, with no wind on the water and cloud cover overhead, the trick is so complete that the sky lives in the pool, the pool lives in the sky, and the deck is the only edge between them.
This one was at the edge of a small hill resort. The chair had been turned to face the view but nobody had sat down yet — it was early. The reflection of the clouds ran perfectly across the foreground, and the soft hills beyond the pool dropped away in three or four overlapping bands of haze. I framed centrally, with the chair off to the right, because the picture wanted to be about the empty space rather than about the chair. Some travel photographs are about what is happening. Others are about what hasn't started yet.