Natural Vs. Artificial: New Jersey Landscape Photography

I have long been interested/obsessed with lightning. As a kid, I used to love going out to the front stoop to watch storms. Living in a neighborhood with lots of trees didn’t exactly afford the best view of lightning or the sky – so the second I could drive, I began logging hours by the shore. At first, it was the bay beach a couple of miles away from my house. After a while, I began to feel comfortable creeping over to the Ocean Gate boardwalk.


I wasn’t doing photography seriously then, but I loved to take my first 35mm film camera with me to take the same 5 photos over and over again on different days. I never even attempted to get a photo of lightning, knowing that the combination of me being a seriously unlucky individual and also a rather cautious one created a cocktail that kept me from the experience. Once I got into photography seriously, I began to love long exposures, fireworks, and essentially any ‘light painting’ photo I could get.


I had not attempted getting shots of lightning until the other night. Having just finished shooting an event, on the way home, I noticed that there was some serious storm going on. It wasn’t raining, the clouds seemed to be in the right position to be able to photograph, and all the impossible variables seemed to fall into place. I set up by Island Heights, and began a relatively frustrating hour checking exposures, getting my timing down, and trying to remember to continuously press the shutter (next on my purchase list: remote shutter). I managed to get several bolts, though the one I’m going to share was the night’s best. It was totally exciting each time I knew I ‘got one’ in my shot, and I am now waiting patiently for the next storm.


Just so you can compare, I’m going to show you nature’s fireworks vs. the ones that we shoot off on the Fourth of July. I tried a little something different with this year’s fireworks and pushed my ISO way higher than I typically do, so I could include some foreground. When I finally got to look at the frames, I was really happy at the sense of ‘awe’ that including the people watching the show included.





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The Sky is Falling!

I’ve really gotten into HDR photography lately. For those of you who do not know, (H)igh (D)ynamic (R)ange photography is when you bracket your shots and combine/tonemap them. Often the results are rather surreal. From what I’m gathering, HDR is both loved and hated. I’m addicted to it.

I can see the issue with HDR. Once you start going HDR, it’s difficult to go back. Once I got a gander at the depth and color in my images, it was difficult to capture such things just doing normal photography. I’m hoping that eventually I will chill and and be able to enjoy taking normal shots again and not feeling the need to go nuts with tonemapping.

That being said, the photo that I’ve included is a recent favorite that I like to call ‘Stormy Monday’. It was right after a huge storm had rolled through the coast. Myself and a friend were squabbling over who got the better storm photos (he had captured lightning with his cell phone camera). Of course, this photo kills his photos dead.

Here’s another shot from the same day. This action was going on a bit to the left of the first shot. Totally different feel with the sky (lacking those swirly whites – which I do love). In general though, the evening produced an epic sky. Unfortunately, these shots meant that I was not on the *other* side of the island for sunset (which looked like it was also epic). There will be other evenings, I suppose.