Before the Squall

The storm had been building for hours by the time I got down to the boulder field at Montauk Point. The tide was pulling back, leaving the rocks wet and reflective, each one catching a different angle of the bruised sky overhead. I got low, almost prone on the stones, because I wanted the foreground to feel overwhelming. Boulders the size of suitcases filling the frame from edge to edge, the eye forced to climb over them before it ever reaches the lighthouse on the hill.

The ultra-wide angle exaggerates the near stones and compresses the distance, which creates a sense of geological accumulation. These are not decorative pebbles. They are the debris of a coastline being slowly dismantled. The clouds collaborate with that energy, stacking themselves into a wall of convective drama directly behind the lighthouse. I waited for the gap in the cloud base that let a single shaft of diffused light fall across the mid-ground rocks, giving the image a tonal centre that the eye can rest on before the sky takes over.

This image pairs with the Nubble lighthouse as a coastal diptych. Where that image is about stillness and long exposure serenity, this one is about turbulence and immediacy. Together they describe the full range of what the Atlantic coastline does: it rests, and then it rages. I need both in the series because a portfolio that only whispers eventually loses its audience.