Dawn’s Early Night, by Jack Megela, was taken at about 4 a.m. under a full moon with a very long timed exposure. “During the exposure,” Megela says, “the water and sky were in motion, thus creating a surrealistic impression.”

To create batik painting Nuclear Pier, Muffy Clark Gill began with a photo she took at sunset. Onto stretched white rayon fabric, she drew an image in charcoal pencil, then painted the fabric with yellow dye. She then painted layers of blue, preserving different shades as well as yellow portions with beeswax and paraffin wax as she progressed. Areas of stressed wax created the crackle veining effect, and Clark Gill ironed, dry-cleaned and re-stretched the piece to achieve the final product.

Carol McArdle painted Pier in the Distance from the beach around 32nd Avenue South. “I love the old pilings in the water,” she says, “and the view of the pier in the distance framed by the palms and their early morning shadows on the sand. Painting there on the beach makes me forget the world and any troubles and takes me to a perfect paradise.”

Jack Megela shot Pastel Splendor on 35 mm negative film just after sunset, through the palms from a vantage point near the pier showers.

Though he works in several mediums, Greg Finley has always been drawn to one favorite: black and white ink drawings, or “stipplings,” which are made up of hundreds of thousands of dots and take several hundreds of hours to complete. The classic look of his specialty befits the historic pier.

“I don’t usually experience motion sickness,” Darron Silva says, “but I almost lost my lunch when pilot Joe Fragione suddenly banked the chopper hard to the right to avoid a flock of seagulls while I was looking through a long lens.” But the journey paid off, and this long-view, pre-sunset shot shows an angle and scale most pier visitors never get to see.