We recently went to New Jersey. Why you ask? We wanted to see governor mandated traffic jams. How do you tell the difference between traffic jams from political spite and traffic jams that just happen? Beats me. They look just the same as the ones that occur from political stupidity like having road construction on every highway ringing the city simultaneously like we do back home. Anyway, we went to see wolves. There are no wolves in NJ you say... just on Wall Street and that's in New York... Well, in the the upper west portion of NJ bordering the Delaware Water Gap and the Pocono Mountains is the Lakota Wolf Preserve. www.lakotawolf.com But you would be correct that the wolves were not originally from Jersey. You can tell by their accents...
About an hour west of the Newark airport (and yes, Delta managed to lose our luggage on a direct flight) Jim and Becky are enthusiastic hosts for a preserve with several packs of wolves including a group of British Columbia wolves which are extinct in the wild. These are not pets. You can arrange an escorted photography shoot during times the preserve is not open to the public. There are ports in the fencing allowing good camera views of the enclosures and Jim and Becky are able to keep the wolves in photographic range for you as well as provide information about wolves for your edification. Although I'm not a crazy nuts wildlife photographer these animals are magnificent and their howling invokes a kind of primordial spiritual response.
Although when you were done with the wolves you would have the option to photograph in the Poconos and Delaware Water Gap we headed into Manhattan to photograph a different kind of wildlife. Street photography is a discipline that requires the ability to anticipate how undirected people might work with an urban scenic backdrop and the ability to see a landscape made of buildings, streets, etc. I find that the most interesting shots occur when there is precipitation and especially at night. This is really a topic that deserves its own blog post so I'll just end this one with another image.
