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.
Better Off Bayside — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/80
I thought about ending this photograph’s title with a question mark to convey the right inflection to reflect my second guessing as where to shoot yesterday. After Friday’s snow I was back to my regularly scheduled sunset shooting on Saturday. Initially I was going to head to Great Bay Boulevard, but idling at the intersection of Nautilus and Route 72 I had a change of heart. Perhaps not up for the longer drive due to hunger I tossed the plan and made for Surf City’sSunset Park.
While this spot seldom disappoints I knew I was taking a bit of a gamble. Over the winter months, as well as the tail end of fall and early spring, with the sun setting at a more southwest orientation it’s sometimes difficult to make a good angle from this purely westward facing spot. For that reason I abandoned bringing the sun disk into the frame. Relying on theater of the mind the sun can be envisioned off screen quite far to the left of my frame. This all worked out, however, with soft wisps of clouds coloring up nicely over the lightly rolling three inch waves lapping the sand and pebbles just on shore.
It was a peaceful seen along Barnegat Bay, and several revelers made it to the shoreline to say goodbye to the day. At least three or four folks with their cameras, and what looked to be a gentleman tucked away in the northwest corner possibly making a time lapse. It’s always nice to see others making the most of the sunset muse. Yet with that my focus shifts back to the upcoming snow potential across the mid-Atlantic over the next 72 hours; because where there’s snow potential, there’s photo potential.
The winds of change blew through the coastal Mid-Atlantic region turning 60 degree temperatures and rain on Thursday into a fleeting winter wonderland come Friday. The predawn hours saw a changeover to snow from west to east as an over-performing coastal low pressure developed along a stalled cold front just off the coast. While there were hints of this possible outcome, a mid-week fade from the models coupled with unseasonably warm temperatures sent this system to the farthest reaches of public consciousness. A trend to a northwest solution began in earnest on Wednesday and didn’t look back until widespread 3″–6″ fell upon an unsuspecting region. As as the alarms sounded many questioned whether 60 degrees and soaking wet ground could create an accumulating snow solution some 18 hours later? In hindsight such skepticism was put to bed.
For my entire life I’ve watched the weather in awe. Captivated not just by its patterns and trends, but by its consistent penchant to surprise. There are no sure things in weather, and given a large enough sample size over a long enough period of time, and you’re bound to observe rare, if not entirely unique occurrences. In this case not only did the snow show up with much surprise and in the face of doubt, it also disappeared nearly as fast as it came. While making photos out in the Greenwood Forest Wildlife Management Area just after the snow had stopped the great thaw had begun immediately. A snow melt the likes of which I had never seen. With sun-kissed energy pine boughs began shedding their load as temperatures rose and some wind worked through to ease their weighted burden. Steady streams of snow, water, and ice were melting away at a rate I’ve never before witnessed. It was as if the Pinelands were insistent upon forging forward to spring in the blink of an eye. Despite clear skies working in, the forest looked and sounded as though a robust summer downpour was working through the thicket. You could watch and hear the earth take its snow back in real time. A symphony for the senses.
Of course the immediacy of the melt brought on some needed expediency for making photographs. Matters were made a bit more tricky as softball sized snowballs were dive bombing the ground both readily and at random from the canopy. My camera and I took a few good hits before the lens and body were too overwhelmed with water, giving me just enough time to make this photograph and a few others. A brief moment in time captured before any remnant of our latest weather event fell into obscurity. A ghost storm if there ever was one.
Oh, and there are a few storm signals looming to start next week. For now, we track.
On Moments of Stillness and Reflection — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Life happens. Good, bad, or indifferent life happens most when we least expect. The random acts of chaos that lay waste to any and all attempts at preparation and control. Casting aside sudden change’s immediate injection of drama—positive or otherwise—the dust settles to reveal opportunities for growth, change, and renewal. Yet when the certainty of impermanence becomes all too real it can become a bit tough to remember that advice in the heat of the moment.
How we deal with the uncontrolled happenstance of life is a central part of the human experience. How we maintain perspective and sensibility in the face of upheaval works to keep us malleable enough to reshape ourselves in the face of change without losing who we are. When life gets a little bit weird it’s the little things that can help pull us through. Maybe laying eyes on the uninterrupted smoothness of a dead calm body of water, reflecting the setting sun without a imperfection. A scene with wind so still you can close your eyes to hear nothing but your heart stir, reminding us we are alive and well. These brief cuts of serenity now steel us for the insanity later.
Tonight’s sky, yo. Things were on fire. Smoldering clouds, disjointed and layered, torched in a fiery orange glow. Somewhere lost in time Hephaestus hammers away at his hellforge, sparks igniting the earthly sky of our modern domain. Was this the look the bronze age sky had cast as Achilles’ shield was crafted? All I can say is high drama was the Dock Road scene as a scintillating sunset pulsed upon the marsh.
Tonight getting the shot was the simple part of the process. It was corralling the 7 brackets in post processing that was the challenge. The orange and reds were amped and it took a deal of desaturation, hue, and luminance adjustments to get things under control—lest this be blow out city. Fortunately with a few whip cracks and some deft slider work things were brought back within reason. With that I am happy to close out another productive weekend of shooting. Here’s to a great week.
Leading Lines and Lazy Misfires — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/6 sec
GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE . . .
No, original NES Link, I’m not a hungry Goriya looking for a free lunch. Instead I’m just a dude (probably hungry) who’s going to spend a few hundred words whining a bit about what might have been. I like this photograph. I like it more than the one I posted last night—and here comes the but—but man did I turn this into a rush job. A rush job thereby leaving me without the stillness and subsequent sharpness I come to expect of myself and my photographs. Sure there’s a time and a place for soft edges and blurred lines, this was not one of those times.
It’s not uncommon for me to remove my camera body from its tripod head once I’ve settled on my shot of the night. Last night was no different. With a few minutes of time to kill, and a stunning pastel light show happening opposite of sunset over the ocean toward the northeast, I popped off a few handheld shots. Here’s where the lazy misfire comes into play. In my haste to make a shot I should have noticed that my shutter speed was down to 1/6 of one second. At a 14mm focal length this pushes sharpness to its limits. As a general rule when I am photographing handheld I try to never shoot at a shutter speed less than the focal length of my lens. So if I’ve got my 100mm on I tend to stay north of 1/100 of a second; rocking my nifty fifty I stay above 1/50, and so it goes. Of course there are exceptions, and if I take the time to still my legs, slow my inhale and depress the shutter in between breaths, I am able to push this further but I digress.
I took neither the time nor the care to make sure I was appropriately still yesterday, and have been kicking myself for it ever since seeing this shot in Lightroom. In hindsight I should have done one of two things: 1) move my tripod to reposition for this shot, rendering the sharpest and cleanest possible outcome, or 2) I at least should have dialed up my ISO to 400 to give me a quicker shutter speed for a sharper image. (At 400 ISO the shutter would be 4 times faster than at 100 while at the same aperture).
Now if you’re sitting back looking at this photo thinking Greg, you’re crazy! well you wouldn’t be wrong, but you also wouldn’t be entirely right. Viewed small enough this photograph appears quite sharp, quite clean. But if you blow it up and look close enough, particularly at the shells in the sand, you will clearly see the absence of sharpness. The ghosting around the shells gives my misfire away. It shows just enough camera shake during the 1/6 exposure. Enough shake to keep this from being a candidate for any kind of medium to large print. Le sigh. As to whether this is a lesson learned the hard way, we shall see. If you made it this far thanks for listening to me vent, I think it’s important to openly share our mistakes.
Holgate Time — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Holgate, New Jersey. Long Beach Island’s southern most tip makes for some high drama in the dead of winter. Considering its south-by-southwest orientation it aligns splendidly for the southwest sunsets that render over the winter months; giving photographers options to shoot toward the southwest, or to maintain a southeastern angle to work the shore break into the frame. (As I did in the photo above.) I can’t act like Holgate was my idea. All hats be tipped—real or imagined—go to Jeff Ruemeli who called me a little after 2:00 p.m. to let me know he had it on good authority that winter storm Jonas wreaked some havoc down there, and he had heard other photographer’s lauding its praises.
While I did Instagram a cellphone photograph of one of the uncovered jetties, I went with a more conventional exposure for my main image. The undulating sand was impossible to ignore, and after a brief warm up in the car, I set to working out how best to convey the pattern. Admittedly I struggled determining the optimal height to expose the photo. I wanted to get close enough to draw the eye to the reticulated sand, but still wanted to ensure the shore break was discernible across the center of the image.
I went back and forth between posting this or a vertical orientation exposure that I made handheld from a single frame. While I compositionally prefer the other shot, because it was handheld at a somewhat sluggish 1/6 of a second shutter it just wasn’t quite as sharp as it needed to be. Certainly not sharp enough to render cleanly at a large enough size. Imperfections aside I still may post it here tomorrow as the leading lines of the photo are a real standout. We’ll see.
Big time shout out to the kite surfer battling the elements and working the shore break big time. He owned that steady wind out of the south-southeast, and was riding with noteworthy balance and endurance. He went non-stop for what must have been an hour, seldom if ever coming off his board. Yeah, and it wasn’t exactly warm out there, either. Cheers, buddy.
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’ssunset 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.
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.
