Owls Head Lighthouse

Author's Comments

The lighthouse itself is small. That is the first thing to know. Thirty feet of white tower on a headland that does most of the work, and the photograph almost everyone wants is the one from below, from the rocks at the base of the wooden stairs, looking up. It is a good photograph. Worth making. The cliff rises and the spruce crowds the edge and the light sits at the top like punctuation. But I prefer the mornings here in late May, when the fog has not entirely burned off Penobscot Bay and the lighthouse appears and disappears as the air moves. The horn sounds. The water below is the color of slate. There is a particular ten or fifteen minutes when the sun begins to cut through and the spruce on the headland goes from black to deep green, and that is the frame I keep waiting for. Come early. The parking area is small and the trail to the tower is short, but the rocky shore below the stairs takes some scrambling, and the tide matters more than people expect. At low tide you can work the foreground - kelp on stone, tide pools, the long horizontal of the bay opening east toward the islands. At high tide the composition compresses and the lighthouse has to do more of the work alone. I have made the wide shot. I have made the detail of the lantern room glass with morning light passing through it. The photograph I have not quite made yet is the one with a lobster boat moving through the channel below at the moment the fog lifts. I will be back for it.

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