The New Landscape: New Jersey Fine Art Photography

I’ve always been a believer that Mother Nature is a cruel but beautiful mistress, and that the ocean deserves the utmost respect. When disasters happen, I can’t help but often feel like the ocean gives and takes, and that the way it leaves things is often the way it wants them.

The jetty down at Island Beach State Park has long been one of my favorite spots. I remember being in middle school and walking down with some family friends for the first time. It’s a mile or so of a walk, so to get there by foot you really have to want it. I found an enormous, perfect whelk shell. It was like finding GOLD. I was awed at the time that I just happened to be passing by the spot where that beauty washed up. I have never found another. I’ve found other neat things, and I do harbor an intense love of perfect scallop shells. I used to intently search for a perfect, pure white one. Believe it or not – they’re actually insanely difficult to find. Mostly they’re black, or reddish, or an assortment of colors. Over many years of looking I only ever found one that was truly white. I display it in a velvet ring box – perhaps as a reminder that even when the ocean flings things like Super-storm Sandy at the coast, it also produces small, perfect miracles. But I digress.

The landscape of the jetty changed significantly after the storm. Oddly enough, it now makes for more beautiful photographs thanks to a lovely tide pool that is somewhat reminiscent of what it looked like many years ago. I don’t know that us humans will allow it to stay that way for long, but I can’t help but enjoy the beauty that is there now.

Without further ado…

Hello, 2012

I always make promises and then go right ahead and break them. I know I was talking about how awesome New Year’s Day’s sunset was, and how I was going to post it yesterday – but I got tied into writing a 6 page paper that was due last night. It was one of those papers that I really had to force myself to write, and I kept getting distracted. Six hours later the paper came to fruition, but it was a battle the whole way. My advice to you: winter intersession classes are no joke.

Anyway, now let’s get epic.

Ray and I have this tradition where every year on New Year’s Day, we go down to the jetty and watch sunset at the lighthouse. It started like 4 years ago when Ol’ Barney got re-lit, and on New Year’s Day we saw the first beacon to come from the lighthouse in something like 30 years. It was pretty cool, so we made it tradition. Unfortunately, the past 2 years the weather has been conspiring against us. Last year, there was a snowicane/snowpocalypse so we couldn’t get down, because there were 3 feet of snow on the beach. This year, we managed to get on Island Beach State Park, but the wind was howling something like 20mph out of the south. South wind is not fun down at the jetty, because it’s whipping right in your face. When the windchill is somewhere about 30 degrees – it is just no fun. I had a feeling that even my sturdy new tripod was not going to stand up to that – so we changed plans.

We went to the bird blind, and I landed a pretty cool shot that I like and will share:

Ray and I bought ourselves Photoshop Cs5 for Christmas, and I used it for the first time editing this photo. I am not that good at it yet – but I managed to make a couple layers and use a mask. It will no doubt be my best work – but I was happy that I managed to get something done with it. That program is a monster.

We went to Seaside Park for sunset, and it wasn’t looking like the most awesome sunset of the year. I decided to still get some shooting in – and I was really glad that I did. I landed this beauty:

It was definitely a case of ‘right time, right place’ since the sun almost immediately disappeared back behind the clouds and was lost forever (or at least overnight). Something about the way that the sun is perfectly hitting that pink-orange color, with all the blue and purple just really does it for me.

I don’t want to sit here and claim ‘shot of the year’ on January 5th… but it’s in the running.