Rich Jay is a New Jersey based photographer with a love of low light photography. A graduate of New Jersey Institute of Technology with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, he began his journey into photography in 2017. While on a trip to the Allegheny Plateau in Pennsylvania to marvel under the milky way core in Cherry Springs, he realized that a large majority of the NY/NJ/PA tri state had never seen the milky way because of the massive light pollution that blankets most of the east coast. The following year, he returned to Cherry Springs with a DSLR and a tripod and with his understanding of optics, began to memorialize the night sky. Friends and family were awed by the “funny looking cloud’ that is the milky way core and inspired more trips and greater mastering of this category of photography. During the fall and winter, when the milky way was no longer visible in the northern hemisphere, he began to document his second interest, abandoned and derelict buildings. While there are vast differences between the two categories, there are significant similarities. Both require a tripod and long exposures, both require multiple exposures merged into a single image, and both are scenes that most people have never seen. While everyone has seen a sunset, a sunrise, a stunning landscape view or a still lake at some point in their lives, but few have witnessed the milky way, a winter’s star blanketed sky, or a 150-year-old building with 100-year-old wooden wheelchairs rotting inside. Rich Jay continues to seek locations and scenes that are out of reach for most, capture them, and share them through his photography.