Firefly Imageworks

Lighthouse at Work

One of the more interesting shots from the recent Outer Banks trip was this puppy to the left. In something I hope I’ll feel up to doing more often, I figured I’d talk a little about how this shot came to be – but that’ll be contingent upon having shots with interesting backstories. We’ll see how it goes.

My cousin Shane, his wife Amy, and myself were all sitting around on my first night there and musing about what interesting shots we could take. Amy shared some of her lighthouse at night shots from the night prior and it got my wheels turning about how I’d always wanted to do some long exposures of a lighthouse. And so it began.

We originally came right up on the thing. I’d seen some long exposure shots that had the light leaving it’s light trail in varying directions as it spun around, and that idea appealed to me, but… well… come to find out you need the light to be blinking to do that. No dice here.

That said, it was still a fun shot, so I went for it a few times, adjusting the white balance just enough to make the light a more white/blue tint and not so yellow/orange. Eventually we had the idea of illuminating the base of the lighthouse with car headlights, and that really began to make it pop more.

Finally, Shane had a brilliant little idea of driving to where the lighthouse used to be and shooting it from further away. See, the Hatteras Lighthouse used to be about a half mile away. A couple years back, it was moved (via a very very careful process) away from the eroding waters’ edge. The wide trail that was used from point A to B was still fresh and offered a clear line of sight from a distance.

We drove to the end of the clearing, and sure enough, the view was perfect. Shane left me and drove back to illuminate the base again with his Jeep Cherokee’s headlights (if you look carefully you can see its silhouette along the bottom of the lightened area). I set the camera up on my tripod and took a few shots using a 30 second exposure, trying to keep the tall tower of red lights to the left out of view.

What resulted was beautiful, and while some of the red lights from the offending tower bled into the shot, it was interesting enough to keep.

It wasn’t until later that a closer look at the seemingly still stars (alliteration!) had actually moved a bit with the earth’s rotation over the course of the 30-second exposure. At first, I was a little dismayed by it, but… that just illustrates how amazing this planet/universe/place actually is. I’m keeping it.

So, what do you think? Any long exposure stories or tips? Comments about the photo itself? Critiques? Do tell.