Sand St. Beach, Stony Brook

My destination for this project was the Sand Street Beach, a small, pebbly beach adjacent to the Stony Brook Yacht Club and Village Center. Before recently moving, I would walk from my house to this beach often to take in the scenery and relax. The landscape of the beach fluctuates with the tides and seasons, revealing sand bars and marshland at low tides, and colonies of hundreds of tiny crabs during the late summer. On this day, there were many people strolling on the beach with their dogs, and walking along and fishing over the dock.

I decided to capture as much of the scenery as I could using the narrative-like approach seen in example artist Alfredo Jaar’s photo series Gold in the Morning. I took far away landscape shots so that the viewer can get an idea of the expanse of the beach, and an overall feel of the space. I interspersed these landscape photographs with medium-shot photographs in which the density of the detail increases and the viewer can see various forms of activity (i.e. a man fishing, a seagull pulling a worm up from the water) , and with close-up photographs where context is restricted but miniscule details are there for the viewer to behold (scattered seashells and pebbles, seaweed below the water’s surface).

These three varying distances are all equally important in telling a story of the placid, yet busy beach on this specific excursion. The viewer might not be readily aware of the coexistence between the various man-made and natural formations, and living things, because of how seamlessly they blend into each other.  A close-up photograph of a metal wall that extends into the water has been cloaked in barnacles, giving the appearance of something living while retaining the tell-tale signs of something manufactured. The water, birds, people, shellfish, trees and aquatic plant life all claim a piece of the beach; whether they command our attention or get passed by depends on how close up we decide to look.

Editing: I adjusted each photographs using similar parameters, such as increasing contrast, exposure and blacks slightly, decreasing highlights drastically to correct for areas of starkness, and increasing whites to bring back the brightness that would be lost from reduced highlights. The color balance was corrected for each photograph; most of them were cooled down slightly to bring the water and sky to their true blueness. In several photographs, I masked objects such as the mussel shell, and the trees in the background of one of the landscape photos, so that I could increase texture without effecting the rest of the image. Certain elements such as the man in the fishing photograph and the red seaweed in the underwater photograph were also masked and increased in contrast and saturation bring out their colors.