Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse

Author's Comments

The classic shot here is well known and for good reason. You descend the wooden stairs, you scramble out onto the granite ledges, and you set up where everyone else has set up, because that is where the lighthouse and the cliff and the sea all line up the way the postcard promised. There is no shame in making that photograph. I have made it. Most people who come here make it. What I would tell you is that the light moves faster than you think. The lighthouse faces west, and at sunset the white tower catches color for maybe twenty minutes before the cliff goes into shadow and the whole scene flattens. Get there early. Claim your rock. The granite is uneven and the good positions are limited, and by the time the sun is actually low you will be sharing the ledges with thirty other tripods. September is when I prefer it. The summer crowds have thinned, the air is clearer, and the Atlantic has that deeper, colder blue that does not happen in July. A long exposure smooths the swell into something closer to mist around the base of the cliff, and the contrast between the soft water and the hard granite is the photograph worth waiting for. Bring a neutral density filter. Bring a headlamp for the walk back up the stairs in the dark. The light itself is small in the frame. That is the honest truth of this place. The lighthouse is the subject in name only - what you are really photographing is the cliff, the sea, and the last warm light of a Maine evening on white-painted iron.

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