Stillness. Calm quiet. Pausing chaos. A tranquility tonic serving up restoration to all who imbibe. Bartender care to fix another?
The evening approaches and cotton candy clouds thread across the sky. Pastels dance upon the strings. Stoic marsh grasses stand tall while glass calm waters reflect back the sunset tableau as would a mirror.
When the marsh takes quiet my world slows down. My anxieties made void in the deadened wind; a resolved peace reflected back in still waters unmoved by nervous energy. Here I seek shelter. Here I find welcome. Here I learn amity. Set upon hushed grasses I hear silence surround me. Anxiety, outflanked by the power of tranquility, falls silent before the still tones of peace.
Wisps of Fate — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
A rough seven days it has been. Long hours, careless mistakes, inattention, and stress all smothered in a shroud of anxiety addled uncertainty. A zero out of 10. Let us not do this again.
Then I come to Dock Road, and I remember. Reminded of the beauty of the natural world I remember there is more to life than our failures and anxieties. We are not the embodiment of our worst selves. We are the light that burns manifold colors over the serene stillness of the life giving marsh.
Late Summer — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Hey, it’s me. The human tasked with running this website, a would-be content producer or something. Of course running is a loose term considering I’ve ghosted for about a month. Since launch in January 2014 I have never missed a month getting at least one post up. So here I am, getting in under the wire on August 31, 2019. For a while this year I was churning out of modicum of quality content but I slipped. Here’s hoping I can get back to regular posts and photographs.
This photo, Late Summer, takes us back to a sparkling sunset that stunned the LBI Region with evening drama on Friday, August 23. I was out at dinner with my family and missed the best parts. Rainbows and mammatus clouds dominated the eastern vantage gracing any and all whom happened to be open on the beach at that hour. It must have been an absolute stunner.
Chagrined and full of missing out anxiety we beelined for home. My toes tapping nervously from the passenger seat at each red light. Looking out the window handcuffed to inactivity, I could do nothing to arrest what I was missing. Finally home I made a mad dash into the house to grab my gear. The clock was ticking. From there it was a full tilt beeline—all while observing proper posted speed limits—to Cedar Run Dock Road.
Once in position I had about 5-10 minutes to capture the remaining light. Nature at least begged my pardon with a sparkling second act. Sure I missed the rainbow infused mammatus, but at least I made out with a pleasing late summer sunset.
With that I check the box for August 2019 posts. Let’s go September; let’s do this. Summer is late but I have no time for early fall.
Hop, Skip, and a Jump — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
I bring you the marsh. I bring you a sunset. I bring you an idiom. The salt marsh was lit last night, and I have the brackets to prove it. I am fortunate to have such a spot to photograph so close to home. Topping the list is Cedar Run Dock Road. A hop, skip, and a jump from my house is holds sway as a striking salt marsh. It is a classic example of a Mid-Atlantic marsh ecosystem primed to support substantial annual avian migrations. How lucky am I that I can be out there in 10 minutes?
I want to critique myself here; not something I do often but it is nagging me enough to share. So out with it: I am not sold on this composition. My eyes and brain struggle with where to look. It’s not so much a balance thing, the weight seems right, as much as the multiple tide pools are somehow disjointed. It’s disrupting my usual ability to know where to look and how to get there as I move across a photograph. I am curious if others feel the same way.
That said the awkward spread of brackish water pools and marsh grass tells a more complete story of the marshland. It lets the viewer in on the spread; the random array of water and green grass as it spans square miles of salt marsh. In this respect it better portrays the salt marsh as it is, a living complex of life and color.
Pastel and glass at sunset on the marsh. Cotton candy spun across the sky looking down upon its mirrored reflection. Serenity now, and to hell with the insanity later. Marsh grasses flex gently in the slightest of breeze, a hint of baby’s breath to complete the tableau. Exhale and smile—it is summer on the salt marsh.
There was nothing too crazy in the execution of this photograph. Tripod and 14mm lens. The former set to a height of about four feet, and the latter dialed in to maximize hyperfocal distance with an aperture of f/8. From there a simple check to get leveled out and then popping off seven bracketed exposures, a one step separation between each. With the lazy shutter on the final bracket allowing more light to illuminate the marsh grass, giving the ghosting effect demonstrating movement. Bringing the baby’s breath breeze into the frame. It is the only hint of motion in an otherwise still scene.
When Mother Nature shows up with a perfect mix of elements execution is simple. It’s a point and shoot situation, and your job is to know where to stand.
You See — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
You can visit the same place over and over for years, photograph it hundreds of times, and to quote the great Yogi Berra, “you can observe a lot by watching.” Which is to see one of my assumptions about the Cedar Run Dock Road salt marsh may be false. For years I operated, with certainty, the notion that come late June/early July the marsh grass would take on a special kind of green. A solid sea of newborn springtime green, uniform and lush. The marsh grass would grow long and the color it cast had such a lively glow that if you stared hard enough you’d think it breathing.
Much of this notion stems from a single, formative photograph I made back in 2013. It was a pair of photographs, actually, yet I have but one posted here. South-facing, a summertime sun shower that to this day still holds a spot in my nine photo portfolio. Suggesting in and of itself I may be holding on to something too tight. This photo shows the marsh in all its green glory. From that point on, as the calendar flipped to June, I would hype on the great green return. Except it has turned more into the great green reckoning. Instead of a green shag carpet the marsh has taken on yellows and reds worked in among the green. I have also observed the grass has not grown quite as tall. Interesting.
So what gives? Were I of a proper scientific mind it would be time to lay down a hypothesis, prepare an experiment, and record results. My observation, however late, as shown my years long hypothesis about greening to be wrong. Is there a way to demonstrate experimentally why? Can said experiment then be independently repeated by others and at other salt marshes? Of course I lack the skill and intellect to make any of this happen, but I will, as any laughable armchair scientist would, spitball the possibilities. I mean anti-intellectualism is en vogue no anyway, am I right?
So here goes. Years of evidence suggests lush green is the exception and not the norm, at least over the past five years. Whatever happened prior is out of reach. So what happened back in the halcyon days of June 2013? I have a couple thoughts. One possibility is the presence of more fresh water in the salt marsh ecosystem. If not freshwater, then some kind of difference in the water table to facilitate lush growth and coloration. The second condition may have wholly been a factor of lighting. I made South-facing in late afternoon as a thunderstorm was pushing in over the marsh from west to east. Set against the darkened, rain filled clouds was a potent dose of golden sunlight. It is possible this let play affected the color of the grasses. I find this latter possibility more dubious, but for right now these two theories are all I have got. If any folks out there in the know what is actually up I would love you to take me to school.
I will end this saunter through my mind’s eye with a quote by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “you see, but you do not observe.”
Update [30 June 2019]: My smart and astute friend Staci dropped this clever insight on Facebook: “Hurricane Sandy, fall 2012. I posit that perhaps all of the detritus and chaos from that storm, toxic to the ecosystem or otherwise, could’ve had an impact.” This makes a lot of sense. Thanks, Staci.
Hit the Pavement — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Get low. You will come across this command often in your development as a shooter. It is especially common for us plying our trade in the landscape photography niche. Get low. Get the shot. Get the viewer in. Throwing a quick and dirty best guess out into the universe, I would ballpark I make some 75% of my landscape photos at a camera height around two feet. So yeah, I follow conventional wisdom to get low.
Shooting on Dock Road a little over a week ago, about a minute or so after I made this shot, I decided to get low, all right. Hella low. The sunset was in max fire mode at a northwest exposure, which is in perfect perpendicular alignment with the west bound direction of the road itself. And so I used what my environment gave me—the asphalt. With careful placement of my camera on the road surface, spaced even between the yellow lines and using the road as a de facto tripod, I made seven brackets facing right into sunset supreme.
The low as you can go orientation brings us to the literal ground floor. Terrapin turtle crossing level. This shrinks the viewer down, in turn amplifying the magnitude and prominence of the road surface. We are so close to the action in this shot, we encounter farsighted focus leaving our immediate contact with the road blurred. This allows the viewer to climb into the frame and scan down the road, ultimately finding sharp focus on what was a potent sunset burn.
Leading lines help to further guide our vision. First and most obvious we have the center weighted double yellow lines. This sends us right down the frame. Added to that we have the converging lines of the two sides of the roads. Flanked by guardrails and power lines on the right side. This line work coupled with the smattering of houses along the horizon pulls everything to the vanishing point of the photograph. Here it all meets in the middle. Underneath the high drama of a sparkling sunset.
Remember to get low to get down with great photography.
Plane of Remembrance — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/5
Memorial Day 2019. We remember. Think upon the story of our lives and remember the ones who fought and died for peace. Our national story writ large on our sacred fallen. Throughout history honored souls of women and men offered everything to a cause greater than themselves. Yes, there is a paradox in fighting and dying for peace and freedom—but in a world of human debasement it is a fallacy in the greatest need of redress. Heroes of all color and creed step up to give it all. This is the living ideal of what America can be.
My 2019 has been a dive into the past. Our martial past. Audio books have taken me on quite a journey. It began with a two excellent explorations of leadership: Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin extrapolate the hard lessons learned serving with Seal Team 3’s Task Unit Bruiser during 2006’s Battle of Ramadi. Their learnings at the cost of lives to their brothers apply to business, life, and the human spirit. They enforce a critical lesson that leadership and personal ownership up and down the chain of command can overcome any obstacle in any walk of life. Even in Ramadi, then the most dangerous city in the world besieged by a terror force hellbent on holding ground at the total cost of civilian Iraqi and American lives.
From there I pivoted to a rewatch of HBO’s excellent Band of Brothers. Immediately followed up with an audiobook listen of Stephen E. Ambrose’s eponymous accounting of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne. An exploration of sacrifice, brotherhood, and hardship in the critical liberation of Europe from Nazi oppression.
Next I took a dive off a cliff and began a study in the depths of evil. Starting with William L. Shirer’s tome The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Shirer, a journalist on the ground in Berlin during the rise of the Reich shares lived experiences in and among the Nazi power base. I piggy backed this 57+ hour listen with the first two books of Richard J. Evans trilogy on The Third Reich: The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power. The two accountings have been nothing short of a descent into madness. As horrid and omnipresent as I assumed Nazi power always had been was somehow not strong enough. With cold, calculated, and controlled consent of the people in deference to Party, a complete and total shroud of evil was born in central Europe. Only to metastasize and spread east and west. Capitalizing on a thirst for power, redress for perceived World War I exploitation, fear of bolshevism, stark economic hardship, longing for authoritarianism, racial hygiene, and naked anti-semitism, the far-right ideology of the NSDAP took hold. It’s been a cold reminder of the absolute worst in humanity. It has affected me in ways I cannot articulate, but my mental discomfort is nothing. This is about those who rose up to fight and die against evil in its final form.
Our thanks will never be enough. Our remembrance will never be enough. But then again patriots never made this about themselves. Yet our world would be unequivocally worse with your sacrifice. I leave you with Jocko Willink’s, Remember Me. Please listen.
On the Side of Light — 14mm | f/8 | ISO 100 | 7 Bracketed Exposures
Sunset, oh how I have missed you. It’s been a long time since my last sunset. Months. Several months. We are talking near on four whole months. A quick look back at the archives has February 2, 2019, as my last trip out. Back when the old marina on Great Bay Boulevard found itself locked in ice. Yeah, it’s been a minute. No investigation required to know it’s my longest sunset dry spell since I began photo making in 2012.
Two nights ago I hit up Dock Road with my girlfriend and her soon-to-be three year old daughter. It was a family affair and it was nice to be back at my old haunt with special people. Spring green is popping in the marsh and you know that has me excited. It adds intensity and dynamism to any composition. Storms were in the area and they came bearing dramatic sky gifts. The mix of fiery color, intense clouds, newborn marsh, and pastel anticrepuscular rays came together strong on the side of light. It was a stunning scene made all the better by a well placed reflection in the tide pool.
Having been back out there I have rediscovered the burning desire to make more sunset photographs. I can’t wait for my next opportunity—and I will not let four whole months stand in my way this time.
