There's a skunk in this story. I'll get to it.

Daniel photographs Presque Isle State Park because it's there. That's the simplest answer, and maybe the truest. Seven miles of shifting peninsula curving into Lake Erie like a question mark. Marshes, dunes, forested trails that dead-end at water. It's twenty minutes from the house.

Bad weather pulls him toward it. It's a pattern anyone who knows his work would recognize. Storm warnings, that particular charged light before the sky opens up, conditions most people avoid.

What the Camera Doesn't Get

The photographs can't hold everything. They can't hold the smell of pine needles thick on shadowed ground, or the softness of moss underfoot on the trail. They can't capture the sound of ice cracking across the bay, or the specific way wind picks up sand on the beach during a gale—thick enough that the air turns brown, fine enough that it finds its way between your teeth no matter how tightly you close your mouth.

He told me about the coyote once. February, snow on the ground, two trails intersecting. He looked down one path, the coyote looked back, and then they each continued. The photograph of that moment doesn't exist. Some things you just carry.

What the camera does get: the aftermath. The shapes that remain after weather has moved through. The blue hour glow that makes water and sky trade places.

The Shoreline Keeps Changing

This is what pulls him back. Presque Isle doesn't stay still. Storm systems redraw the beaches overnight. Trees that anchored his compositions five years ago are gone now, pulled into the lake. Dunes migrate. Wooden pilings emerge from the sand at Short Jetty Beach after certain storms, remnants of something once functional, now just geometry and decay.

He returns to the same spots. Gull Point. The lighthouse that's stood watch since 1872. Perry Monument in rare light. Not to photograph the same thing twice, but to see what's changed. What's been taken. What's appeared.

The work isn't about recording what's there. It's about revealing what won't stay.

Blue Hour, Specifically

There's a technical answer: the light is even, shadowless, forgiving. Long exposures turn waves into breath. Everything glows without glare.

But that's not why he waits for it.

Blue hour is the light of in-between. Not day, not night. The sky still holds color where the sun set some time ago, but the ground has already given up. It's the moment when you can see more with the camera than with your eyes, when a thirty-second exposure reveals luminosity the human eye can't quite register.

It's calm light. Slow light. Light that accumulates rather than strikes.

And sometimes, while you're waiting for it to accumulate, other things happen.

The Skunk

After a long day at Letchworth State Park, he drove back to Presque Isle just as dusk was settling. He'd been waiting for the right conditions at a particular spot—the kind of patience that looks like stubbornness unless you understand the obsession. Tripod set. Long exposure running. Sky still glowing where the sun had been.

Two white lines moved beneath the tripod legs.

Just movement in the peripheral vision. A skunk, navigating its own evening, unaware or unconcerned that a man with a camera had planted himself in its path.

He didn't move. The skunk didn't spray. They shared the blue hour in their separate ways, and then it wandered off.

The photograph from that night exists. It holds the light, the water, the composition he'd been waiting for. It doesn't hold the skunk, or the held breath, or the strange intimacy of sharing space with something wild that could ruin your evening but chose not to.

This is the tension in all of it: what stays in the frame, what stays in memory.

What the Work Holds

Daniel's photographs of Presque Isle move across seasons and weather systems. Spring fog. Summer storms. Autumn light that turns everything gold before it goes dark. Winter's bare geometry, ice drawing lines across the lake's surface.

Some images stay in color: the drama of sunset, the specific purple of storm light. Others withdraw into black and white, where texture and form become their own language. Abstractions. Reflections in wet sand. The Presque Isle Lighthouse softened by fog. Wooden relics half-buried and revealed again.

The work doesn't shout. It accumulates. Image by image, season by season, returning to the same peninsula that won't stay the same.

Living With These Images

These aren't postcards. They're not trying to convince you Presque Isle is beautiful, though it is, in the way that most things touched by weather and time eventually become beautiful.

They're trying to hold something more difficult: the feeling of standing in a place that's always leaving. The way light can make water look like sky. The dignity in things that have been worn down. The blue hour's strange generosity.

Each photograph is printed with attention to tone and fidelity, signed, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. They exist in limited editions because the places they depict are already limited, already half-gone, already changing.

To bring one into your space is to bring that tension with it. The conversation between what remains and what's already been taken. The moment you stood still and waited. The blizzard you ran toward.

The Collection

You can explore the full body of work in the Presque Isle collection on burykin.art. Each image is available in various fine art formats and sizes.

Or you can visit Presque Isle yourself. Drive toward the bad weather. Wait for the light that only the camera can fully see. Stand very still when something wild passes through.

The peninsula will still be there. Differently.

—Heloise Ruen

‍