Greg Molyneux Photography

Tag: frozen

  • The Cold Will Roll

    The Cold Will Roll

    Sunset photograph of salt marsh just frozen over
    The Cold Will Roll — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/125

    It’s on, New Jersey. True arctic air is rolling across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and with it comes a polar left hook of cold to the jaw of we the lower latitude dwellers. While the bays remain open water for now, the marshes have begun the inescapable transition to pop-up ice world. In the face of possible subzero temperatures overnight I imagine said bays will not be far behind. This is a not so welcome reminder of the powerful cold we squared off against in winter’s 2014 and 2015. Fortunately this cold snap will not have that kind of staying power.

    In the face of biting cold and stiff wind I simplified my shooting workflow tonight. There was no tripod. There was no bracketing. With steady gusts over 30 mph, stability and warmth was a factor. With that I had a go with some old school single bracket handheld shooting. Aided by a frozen marsh I was able to get up close and personal with the tide pool above. On my knees from right at the water’s edge, bringing the viewer right into the sunset action. Juxtapose this with a very similar shot I made earlier this month from this spot where I am set farther back, with the camera several feet higher. Notice how the perspective and intimacy change over the span of only a few feet? I prefer tonight’s tucked in look.

    From now through Sunday we let the cold air roll. May it bring the deep purple sky I long for.

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  • Fired and Frozen

    Fired and Frozen

    Vertical orientation photograph of an explosive sunset over frozen marsh and phragmites
    Fired and Frozen — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    I avoid vertical orientation photography, and I’m doing myself a disservice. Despite its obvious place and application in landscape photography I remain reluctant to exploit it. Unpacking my reasoning and there’s a few things at play here: 1) I dropped my camera pretty early on and its gyroscope—and thereby level—is useless, rendering level horizons a bit harder to dial in when the camera is upright; 2) my website homepage renders all images in a traditional 3:2 crop ratio (standard crop you’d get from any 35mm film camera); 3) when viewing a single post page—such as this one—from a desktop the left-justification of the photo is a little bit wonky; and 4) I’m just not comfortable making them. To confuse things further, I prefer to shoot vertically from my mobile device as opposed to landscape. Without contradictions, I am not. It was actually a photograph I shared to Instagram last night that led me to go back and process my DSLR version of Sunday night’s sunset this evening.

    Yet as I walk through the reasons cited above one thing becomes immediately clear—only one of those reasons has anything to do with photography. While all four in some degree or another shed light on the pitfalls of perfectionism, two of those reasons are remnants of my past life as a web designer. To be fair it’s not entirely a past life as I do have this place to still dabble in the front end web world, if only a little. In the immediate future, however? I will make it a point to shoot vertical more often. Not only is it the lone path to improvement, it’s a key piece to the landscape photographers repertoire. I can no longer choose to sit out. In the meantime my buddy Ben excels at the technique and took a mean shot this morning. That coupled with my Instagram shot sort of set this line of thinking in motion. He also shows off several exemplar vertical images on his 2015 best of post.

    In order to scratch the perfectionist itch maybe I’ll carve out some time to address my web layout issues with vertical photos. Maybe.

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  • A Bridge Too Far

    A Bridge Too Far

    Sunset photograph taken atop a bridge overlooking a frozen marsh a day after Winter Storm Jonas
    A Bridge Too Far — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    There would be weather they said. Follow the global models they said. Disregard the NAM they said. The heaviest bands will never push north they said. Well here we are one day after the Blizzard of 2016, and I’m sure many a backs are barking from a long day of digging out after wondering, dude, where’s my car? This was one for the record books, folks, and even though the biggest snows happened just a few miles to my north and to my west, the coast sure saw a battering at the hands of a fired up Atlantic Ocean. After spending the better of the weekend weathering the storm with friends, fretting over rain/snow lines only to later find myself and swan diving into snow after the changeover, my buddy and I finally made it out for some real deal photo making this evening.

    After much hemming and hawing over where to shoot, most of which happened during a pitiful attempt to clear out my driveway, an unsolicited query from family friends on Dock Road asking my Mother if I was out shooting said road solidified the final destination. Understanding the marsh isthmus no doubt took a serious tidal beating, we didn’t exactly know what we were in for at the Road of Dock.

    The scene upon arrival was otherworldly. Elevated sea levels and ice flows littering the marsh dominated the landscape. While the tide was mostly down at this point, its frozen remnants were not hard to parse out. The vestiges of a foul tempered nor’easter were visible horizon to horizon, and before long the power of the wind was clearly on display. No less than four telephone poles were down, with power lines sidewinding the single road for what must have been a mile. Yes the scene was surreal but that was quickly supplanted with the sobering reality that real humans live amidst this battered place of wonderment, and here they are tasked with wintering it out sans power in the wake of a powerful winter storm—one that will most certainly be regaled as historic in the pantheon of east coast storms.

    While my picture making was at a minimum this weekend, yet this photograph marks my first documentation of New Jersey in a post Winter Storm Jonas world. Here’s hoping you fared as well as possible during this powerful weather system, and were able to make the most of your time indoors. Cheers.

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  • Perhaps this is Goodbye?

    Perhaps this is Goodbye?

    Sunset photograph of frozen bay ice locking in marina posts
    Perhaps this is Goodbye? — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    Be it superstition, confirmation bias, or an actual demonstrable trend to which I have neither the data nor scientific awareness to prove, pre-storm sunset skies always seem to deliver. Today sure fit the narrative. Anticipating winter storm Jonas’ arrival has ground my personal perception of time to a relative halt. Since Monday night the hours, such as they are, have ticked by like days as I click weary-eyed from one model run to another, waiting interminably on weather to arrive. Yet no matter what the models show me, and despite the Blizzard Watch we’re sitting under currently, the pangs of last year’s bust at the hands of Juno gnaw away at my insides. I just want the snow to get here, stay here, and with any, luck bring little to no rain to southeastern New Jersey. Of course that toasty Atlantic Ocean looms large, ready to push warm maritime air onto our shores if the center of low pressure creeps close enough.

    But let’s push my selfishness aside for a second, coastal flooding and beach erosion is the real concern here. But as the far less sexy story overshadowed by the high probability of widespread 12″ snow across much of the Mid-Atlantic, the tidal implications of a roiling ocean have been lost in the shuffle. We’re looking at an extended storm with a duration over 24 hours complete with a broad wind field of tightly packed isobars slinging wind gusts of around 60mph onto New Jersey shores. It’s subsequent storm surge will be aided by an ill-timed Full Moon giving an unneeded boost to already moderate to major tide heights. At least three high tides will be affected from Saturday morning through Sunday evening.

    It is with this reality I title my post. Understanding the marina is now state owned and seemingly set to restore to its natural state, there’s a good change this little cove will look quite different as soon as Monday. These derelict posts of wood that once gave aid to docks and quays may soon be little more than a memory. This is why in considering where on Great Bay Boulevard to photograph today I recalled the wise words of Ben Wurst, instructing me to shoot here as often as possible fore it may soon be gone.

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  • Cold Milestone

    Cold Milestone

    Landscape photograph of a snowy mid-Atlantic salt marsh at sunset
    Cold Milestone — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    Anyone in the mid-Atlantic who even bothered to step foot outside today will find no shocking revelation in my declaration of today’s cold. Sure it was below freezing all day, but holy cow did the biting cold and piercing winds level up out on the marsh of Cedar Run Dock Road. The wind ripping across a rapidly freezing marsh plane was eye watering and hand destroying. Not even some impromptu jumping jacks were making a difference. It was no fun touching the cold metal of my tripod, clumsily thumbing the extension latches to unfurl the legs. But these are of course the chilled hazards of the job.

    In hindsight extending the tripod legs wasn’t even necessary. This evening turned into one of those shoots where I wound up going with my very first set of brackets. This exposure was made with the camera and tripod low to the ground; tucked into the frozen marsh grass to draw the viewer into the scene. A big part of why I’m posting this shot is because it’s the only set of brackets that still had enough sunlight to catch the pink glow painting the frozen edge of the marsh grass. Thus bringing visual warmth to a scene that was otherwise and quite literally devoid of it. Those sunbeams didn’t hurt, either.

    Celebrating Two Years

    Fun bit of housekeeping: this here website is celebrating its second birthday today. Since I first uploaded Beyond the Gray Sky two years ago I’ve added 240 photographs good for 232 posts. I’m beyond pleased with my small little home on the internet, and I hope you’ve enjoyed my modest contribution to what I hope is solid internet content. Here’s looking forward to a promising third year. Thank you.

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  • Evenfall

    Wide angle HDR photograph taken at sunset over a snowy and frozen Stafford Forge Wildlife Management Area in the New Jersey Pinelands
    Evenfall — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    Just sit back, take in this photo, listen to The Passing of the Elves and it’s Calgon, take me away!

    I know many of us have had it with the snow, but please indulge me this third and final photograph from my serendipitous photo foray at Stafford Forge Wildlife Management Area this past Friday, March 6th in the two thousand and fifteenth year of the common era.

    This, the third picture in this series, continues with the fantastical visual theme of snow, woods, ice and light arranged in an array untouched by man. Our environment is one of the few cherished gifts we can pass on to our future generations, and there’s no reason for these places of wonder to only live on in memory and photographs alone.

  • Fall in love with the forest over and over again

    Fall in love with the forest over and over again

    An HDR photograph of winter in the Pinelands: fresh fallen snow, numerous pitch pines, footprints and lively golden light make the scene
    Fall in love with the forest over and over again — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    I grew up in the woods. Spending my earliest years in East Brunswick, New Jersey—a municipal casualty of suburban sprawl—I was lucky enough to live in a sleepy little neighborhood of roughly 52 houses on a small dead-end buttressed by The Woods. And while it wasn’t a tree strewn vista of thousands, or even hundreds of acres, it was a relatively small plot of naturalish habitat that was as big as the whole of the world to an excitable 7 year old with an overcharged imagination and a great group of friends equally inclined. It had a creek, railroad tracks, old abandoned warehouses and a secret path to McDonald’s. Spending our summer vacations equipped with everything a group a friends would ever need to replicate life as depicted in Stand By Me; roaming the woods and railroad tracks hoping to someday come across something so adult as a dead body—or worse.

    Days on end were spent pew-pewing one another as we’d chase our chosen foe after lying in an ambush for the better part of an afternoon. Our game of Guns was how we exercised our wannabe existence, recreating the carnage we witnessed in Platoon—which I was of course watching without my parents’ permission. We’d go so far as to map out routes, tie off ropes and plant booby traps between trees using fishing wire for trip wires. Boom-boom you’re dead, [insert friend’s name here] being the adopted call for you’re out of the game.

    When we weren’t busy replicating violence we didn’t understand, we took a much more peaceful approach to The Woods: resting along the creek, trying to track deer (and failing), catching frogs or just walking and talking. We had our own paradise, free of parents, supervision and the boundaries of the outside world. We were the masters of our domain, free to build forts and pseudo-villages trying make out a life where Robin Hood, his Merry Men and the Ewoks would feel at home. The woods was our place to live out our fantasies, to flesh out the worlds of not just our minds, but of the movies, cartoons and video games that marked our formative years.

    Now I find myself spending more time than ever in that other forest that has been my home for the last 20 years. Gone are the large deciduous trees that stood sentry over my youth, exchanged for the smaller pitch pines and cedars of the New Jersey Pinelands. I’ve spend two decades living on the southeast edge of Pinelands National Preserve, at a whopping 1.1 million acres. If I’m ever to match the intimacy of the woods of my youth, I’ve got some serious exploration to do.

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  • It’s a kind of magic

    It’s a kind of magic

    World class golden hour is magnified by the fresh fallen snow in this HDR photograph taken in the New Jersey Pinelands
    It’s a kind of magic — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    It all came together tonight, folks. The snow. The light. The setting. Many of my favorite things came out to play, and other than to remark on how humbled I felt just to bear witness, I’m not sure what to say. At the very least, this will be the first of three photographs from this evening’s Session with Chance I’ll share with you over the next few days (photo number two; photo number three). Each bears a strong resemblance to the other, capturing the magic and sense of place that made day’s end at The Forge so special.

    Reflecting on where I was, and what I saw, my mind drifted toward my first true love affair: The Snow. For as long as I can remember little has stirred my soul quite like Winter’s weather. I could spend a lifetime watching snow. Forever falling and quieting the world; anticipating the finite wonder left in its wake. All of this—the feeling, the memory, the romance—comes rushing back every time the first flakes fly. In a few brief moments tonight, the culmination of my lifetime’s dalliance came to bear.

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  • Never quite the same

    HDR photograph of Antoinetta's Restaurant backdropped by a stunning blue hour over frozen bay and shores.
    Never quite the same — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures

    Antoinetta’s Restaurant at the end of Cedar Run Dock Road in West Creek, New Jersey has been a go-to spot for years. Long before I even got into this photo taking thing—and long before Antoinetta’s was a thing—I used to take regular cruises down one of the most relaxing four mile drives in the whole of southern Ocean County. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with friends. Whomever came alone this place always hit the spot; even if it was with only myself that I was having conversations.

    Since I launched this website a little over a year ago, this photographs marks the third time I’ve formerly framed up this shot and published. And while on color alone (hey purple!) this could be looked at as the spiritual successor to Winter has its ways, the look still maintains its own essence and vitality. Between tide’s ebb and flow—frozen in this case—and a serendipitous sky palette rendered daily, each unique like the prints upon our fingertips. We photographers benefit insofar as we can visit the same spot time and time again with the excited expectation of a different, unpredictable and sometimes fantastic result.

    So get out there, scout your spots, check your gear, chase the light and shoot there over and over again.

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