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Inverted seascapes provide fresh perspective

Updated 8:35 PM ET, Thu December 17, 2015

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Which part is the sea and which is the sky? For his photo series "The Pull," Michael Massaia printed images of the two as they appeared -- inverted and backward -- on the ground glass of his large-format camera.
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Which part is the sea and which is the sky? For his photo series "The Pull," Michael Massaia printed images of the two as they appeared -- inverted and backward -- on the ground glass of his large-format camera.
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"I was searching for a way to present that type of subject in a new way," Massaia said. "To reintroduce yourself to something you've been looking at for years and to see it in a whole new way."
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"I was searching for a way to present that type of subject in a new way," Massaia said. "To reintroduce yourself to something you've been looking at for years and to see it in a whole new way."
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All the shots were taken in New Jersey, where Massaia grew up.
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All the shots were taken in New Jersey, where Massaia grew up.
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Massaia said that before he takes photos, he sort of storyboards and draws his ideas about exactly what it is he hopes to capture with his camera.
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Massaia said that before he takes photos, he sort of storyboards and draws his ideas about exactly what it is he hopes to capture with his camera.
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"I can take this kind of really uncontrolled, crazy environment -- the ocean -- and basically get it exactly to match what I had in my mind," Massaia said. "I would sit there and wait literally hours to get the right combination of wash on the sand and the right turbulence out on the sea."
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"I can take this kind of really uncontrolled, crazy environment -- the ocean -- and basically get it exactly to match what I had in my mind," Massaia said. "I would sit there and wait literally hours to get the right combination of wash on the sand and the right turbulence out on the sea."
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Massaia's fascination with the ocean and the sky stems from his younger days when he would spend a lot of time surfing throughout New Jersey.
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Massaia's fascination with the ocean and the sky stems from his younger days when he would spend a lot of time surfing throughout New Jersey.
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"I always was looking up at the sky and, especially with surfing, I was always checking wind conditions," he said. "Because I was so freaked out by it, I forced myself to learn a lot about it."
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"I always was looking up at the sky and, especially with surfing, I was always checking wind conditions," he said. "Because I was so freaked out by it, I forced myself to learn a lot about it."
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Massaia said shooting in black and white allowed him to capture "huge amounts of information" while producing a sense of timelessness.
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Massaia said shooting in black and white allowed him to capture "huge amounts of information" while producing a sense of timelessness.
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"There's a bit of a romantic kind of element in just the way I like to view things," Massaia said. "It's exciting to me when you can do something so simple as basically just inverting something, and it takes on this whole other life."
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"There's a bit of a romantic kind of element in just the way I like to view things," Massaia said. "It's exciting to me when you can do something so simple as basically just inverting something, and it takes on this whole other life."
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