Stone Harbor, New Jersey, and surrounding towns, August 2004

Most of these shots were actually taken at the Cape May lighthouse. I took a lot of pictures, but these are the only ones I really liked well enough to share (with the exception of a special series of shots from Wildwood that I'll post later). I suppose these aren't really your usual holiday snapshots. Those I didn't feel like posting.

[ Fresnel lens on display at the Cape May lighthouse ]

I could tell you what this is, but that would spoil the fun. I think this is my favorite photo of the entire vacation.

Oh, okay. If you select this entire paragraph, you'll be able to see in the highlights that this is a photo of a fresnel lens on display at the bottom of the Cape May lighthouse. At the angle this is taken at, the light does not come through the lens.

This shot shows what you see when the light does come through. The resulting image is upside-down, which is what you would expect looking through a lens.

[ Close up of the fresnel lens, taken at an angle that makes it opaque. ]

Another close-up. I love how when it appears opaque, it looks almost metallic.

All of these photos were taken with my Lensbaby, incidentally. I think the chromatic aberration introduced by the lens interacts interestingly with the effects of the big lens. This is another shot through the big lens.

This is back in Stone Harbor at the end of the street our house was on. It's the bay at sunset. We didn't get any really dramatic sunsets during out time there this year, but I like the subtle interplay of the light on the water.