Seeing The Big Apple in a New Light

Midnight Dreary Series V - This image is one of the images from a series of images, or portfolio, called Midnight Dreary. The idea is to capture the whispers of waves breaking under a moonlit sky. There's a surreal emotion captured in the photos and it's become another set of images I am actively working on. They're strong and powerful, retaining detail and structure, while capturing a soft and spooky vibe brah! Did you think that sentence was going to be as full of shit as some of the other stuff I say? Haha, I think they're just RAD! Photo: Matt Clark

Elixir - “I shot this photo with my 70-200mm from the water, I went for a slower shutter speed to capture some movement and that magical New York light. It was taken just west of New York City at the same spot I was actually surfing 13 years ago to the day on September 11th. I was 17 years old then and had just started college.” Photo: Matt Clark

Wildnight- Thanks to Air Hubb Swimfins and Isurus Wetsuits, both of whom proudly support my photography and with that I've discovered even more drive to go out and make these photos. I've watched Clark Little appeal to a broad fan base, which is fascinating to me, he's tapped into a market that's enormous, people who don't surf or live in the middle of America, and this is where I'd like to start to aim. People who don't surf like blue waves, so send me to where the waves are blue and the wind is offshore. Photo: Matt Clark

Caved- Mid-winter New York. This was January of 2014 on a smaller but perfectly clean day, it takes a lot of dedication to suit up and not surf, but to shoot photos instead. None of my photos are shot with the intention of having them published because I just don't find that there's a market for them. Instead it's been my intention of capturing waves shapes and textures over the past year or so. I've seen a lot of other people going down this path and I think it's starting to click that in lots of photographers minds that there's just as much demand to see the work you're passionate about vs. the images of great feats (for example, an incredibly artistic well lit dramatic empty wave vs. someone getting shacked out of their mind at 30 foot Chopes." Photo: Matt Clark

Coloring outside your guidelines - This is what I mean when I say I want to capture what you don't see. This is something you can now examine and see the detail of. Like a thousand swarming bees these droplets of water, each individual and unique for only a moment, are suspended mid-flight in this photograph. Highlights of a freshly fallen sun create a pastel base and the swirling of a crashing wave captures and creates a funnel of air that's changing and contracting. These images are for me, they're personal in a lot of ways, this is my image, it's what I lived, this moment in time is a vision from my life, a sunset wave breaking in New York. Photo: Matt Clark

Last light's highlights - Lots of these pink hues are influencing my style as well. Keeping in mind the end product, I've found that the harsher more contrast laden images to be too overwhelming when people are looking for artwork for an apartment or home. These lighter colors tend to work better with peoples furniture or color schemes. I'm trying to keep this in mind when creating the work in post, the colors are there naturally but it had been my style to force people to look at the work and now I'm finding that the more soothing images are, the better they work with a broader audience. Photo: Matt Clark

Untitled - Rare water colors running this night. I shot this spot at low tide and it had been offshore for two days so that may have been the reason, or maybe it was a present for me. Photo: Matt Clark

Chandelabra- It's like a candle lit chandelier, which I guess technically is still a chandelier, but I wanted to mix candelabra and chandelier so I made chandelabra. Photo: Matt Clark

Untitled - Love me some walls of water. there's so much force about to be unloaded before me. So much energy that's wound up inside that slab of ocean about to pour and burst, yet it's so delicate and beautiful. The reflection on the face looks like a seismograph reading or some sort of musical waveform. I wonder if anyone would be able to translate it into sound and see what that would sound like... Photo: Matt Clark

Shatter- Something about this makes me want to see it shatter. It looks glass blown. Look at that floating mustache cloud up there in the sky. Photo: Matt Clark

Miss Cross- An ode to a great Wes Anderson character from Rushmore. She was soft and beautiful but remained structured and strong. This image just made me think of her and one of the lines from the movie when Max is confronting her and he says "that's a kind of cheap way to put it." and you have this moment where you're completely taken out of the movie by her response. I love it, it just throws you for a loop and I like when that happens in life. Here's to Rosemary Cross. Photo: Matt Clark

Midnight Dreary VII - Here's a look at what I mean by the angle you shoot the photo at, I could have aimed more towards the horizon, but this wave came in and just heaved outward and the detail in the lip is something I lucked out on capturing and there you have it. Something different. Photo: Matt Clark

Midnight Dreary VI - Powerful peaks perfectly present perfection. Pow! That's a heap of water about to unload on a New York sandbar. These waves aren't just for shooting, there really fun dumpy barrels for anyone who can make the quick drop. Photo: Matt Clark

Midnight Dreary I - I think it's best to keep these images titled by number, roman numeral for now as they seem to work best as a set. This is number one or "I". Photo: Matt Clark

Rosemint - Movement plus these long focal distances at open aperture's are also starting to become a theme in my photos. All artists evolve and it's interesting to see it happen over years and decades. Maybe in digital photography it can be a process that's sped up and this is something that would have taken me years to advance to having used film, but we don't live in that time anymore and I think you have to embrace what comes. Fighting the future will leave you in the past, and that's somewhere no human wants to be. Reinvent yourself always. Photo: Matt Clark

Dollop- Again, the fine detail of this image is what makes it interesting to me. I have photos of perfect waves and then I have images that really make me say "Wow, that's something none of us ever see, we may get a moment of it now and then but when you're out surfing, you're not looking at droplets be blown off the top of a wave from a cool offshore summer breeze." Photo: Matt Clark

Icicle- This is a photo I intend to capture, there's no point in trying to argue that this is exactly what it was I wanted it to look like because the truth of the matter when you're shooting surf photos like this is that you're mostly unable to control anything in the photo. You can change your depth of field through aperture and what focal length you choose and to a certain extent change the angle of the image whether you're shooting up at the lip or at the point where you think the lip will crash down. This happened to be a well timed interesting photo that I felt had great texture and conveys that "yes, you are looking at a wave" while also being somewhat abstract. Photo: Matt Clark

Trying to describe my new photos, I came up with this description that I am shooting a boudoir session of the ocean, it's intimate, it's beautiful, it's a way to expose the nature and individual qualities of each wave that breaks. I only able to shoot one set of images to shoot of each wave, sometimes it's one photo and sometimes it's six or seven if I'm lucky. Each wave is a portrait of the ocean, whether I'm shooting only the lip, or the shoulder, or the face, whether I'm trying to capture her strength or her softer qualities, it's all personal and private. Photo: Matt Clark

Untitled - One of my favorite new images I've taken in 2014. Mid-summer hurricane swell, beautiful sunset, seagulls in flight, it's my warm watercolor world. Photo: Matt Clark