In this striking entry from Chapter 6 of Greg Urbano’s Top 100 Journey—titled “The Road Ahead: Recent Work & Ongoing Exploration”—the photographer demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of light manipulation and optical phenomena. Created as part of the 52 Frames community’s Week 38 challenge, which called for images using a single light source, this photograph represents both technical mastery and artistic homage.
The composition centers on a glass sphere resting atop a reflective black acrylic base, positioned against a background of projected linear light patterns. What immediately captivates the viewer is the optical complexity achieved through such seemingly simple elements. The sphere acts as a lens, refracting and inverting the striped pattern behind it, while simultaneously creating a mirror image in the glossy surface below. This doubling effect—one sphere above, one reflected beneath—establishes a visual dialogue between reality and reflection that speaks to photography’s fundamental nature as a medium of light capture.
The photographer’s choice of a Godox TL30 LED wand as his single light source proves particularly astute. Rather than relying on ambient or diffused lighting, he creates a precise, linear pattern that reads as both graphic element and scientific demonstration. The vibrant green illumination pulses across the frame in parallel lines, their luminosity gradating from deep emerald to electric cyan. Where the light passes through the sphere, it bends and concentrates, revealing the optical principles at work while creating areas of intense brilliance that punctuate the geometric order.
This image explicitly acknowledges its lineage. The photographer credits Elizabeth Klepper’s 2023 work from the same community as inspiration—a refreshingly transparent gesture that positions this photograph within a continuum of artistic exchange rather than claiming isolated innovation. Yet this is no mere reproduction. Where Klepper’s original vision provided the conceptual framework, this interpretation carries distinct choices in color temperature, scale, and tonal contrast that mark it as an independent exploration.
The technical execution reveals careful consideration of multiple variables. The exposure balances the intense luminosity of the LED source with the deep blacks of the background and base, maintaining detail across a challenging dynamic range. The focus renders the sphere’s surface with crystalline clarity, allowing viewers to perceive both its transparency and its physical substance simultaneously. The alignment of the linear patterns—maintaining their parallel consistency both in direct view and through the sphere’s distortion—suggests meticulous positioning and multiple test exposures.
Within the context of Chapter 6, this photograph signals a willingness to engage with established visual ideas while pushing toward new territory. The chapter’s subtitle, “Recent Work & Ongoing Exploration,” positions the photographer at a transitional moment, actively investigating techniques and concepts that may inform future directions. This image embodies that investigative spirit—it is simultaneously a study, an exercise, and a finished work worthy of exhibition.
The minimalist aesthetic here contrasts with the more documentary or narrative approaches found in earlier chapters of the Journey. The photographer strips away contextual information, environmental cues, and representational content, focusing instead on pure optical phenomena. Light becomes subject rather than tool. The glass sphere transforms from decorative object to scientific instrument to sculptural form.
What elevates this beyond technical demonstration is its inherent beauty—the mesmerizing quality of those radiating green lines, the perfect symmetry of sphere and reflection, the luminous energy that seems to emanate from the glass itself. It exemplifies how constraint, whether self-imposed or community-mandated, can generate creative solutions that transcend their origins.
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Greg Urbano 