Boston Light on Little Brewster Island

Author's Comments

The boat ride out is most of it. By the time Little Brewster appears off the bow, you have already passed islands and channel markers and the working harbor, and the city has receded into a low silhouette behind you. Boston Light stands white against the Atlantic, and from the water it looks smaller than its eighty-nine feet suggest, though it grows as you approach. I came in late September on an afternoon tour, and the light on the way back was the photograph. Coming out, the sun was high and the tower read flat. Coming back, golden hour caught the granite of the keeper's quarters and the white of the tower against a harbor that had gone the color of weak tea. The wake of the boat made a long line back toward the island, and the light blinked on as we pulled away. It is not an easy place to photograph well. The tours are timed and you cannot wander, the boat does not linger for the hour you might want it to, and the best angles are mostly the ones you cannot quite reach. What you bring home is more often a feeling than a frame - the sense of a structure that has stood there since before the country existed, still doing its work, still tended. A wide lens for the approach. A longer one for the tower itself, especially as you pull away and the scale of the open water begins to assert itself behind the island. The detail shots are inside the keeper's quarters and at the base of the tower, and they reward someone who is paying attention to texture rather than view.

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