Behind the Scene: Nubble Lighthouse in full daylight

As a serious photographer I am well aware of many of the "rules" of photography.  One of them is that there are two good times to make outdoor images: at sunrise and at sunset, during what are called the golden hours and which include the 30 minutes before and after sunrise and sunset.

I am all in favor of the golden hours, but on this day I decided to follow my rule of photography:  the best time to take a picture is when you are there.

In this case, we were at the lighthouse parking lot at 11:30 am and the sun was as high as it was going to get all day.  This made for dark shadows, but by using the new "shadows" slider in Lightroom 4.0 I was able to brighten up some of the rocks.

Mid-day images can have some advantages on clear days if, like me, you love blue sky and puffy clouds. A polarizer would have been nice, but I didn't have one with me.


This first image is a single image taken with a 28mm-e lens. I cropped a little 
on the left and right and a lot on the top and bottom 
to create an HD aspect ratio of 16:9. 

I've kept this version at a 3:2 aspect ratio so I could keep the rocky foreground
in the picture.  The lighthouse is on an island which is so very close to the mainland,
and this image lets you know that.

This is a 2 shot panorama cropped to HD proportions.
My 28mm-e lens didn't quite cover the area so I overlapped two images.
The main subject is a lot smaller in this composition,
but I like this version the best of the three.
Some may object to placing the buildings in the center,
but there is a certain symmetry in this picture that makes we want to keep the island and
the buildings in the center.  I think the snow draws your eye to the lighthouse first,
which is what I want. I think this images screams for a big print.



Behind the Scene: Nubble Lighthouse at Day's End

This has been cropped from the 3 shot 35 megpixel panorama  (seen further below)
that I merged with the help of photoshop.

What I really like about the above scene is that it punctuated a wonderful day of skiing at Sunday River in Bethel, Maine with my daughter.  Thanks to daylight savings, after leaving Bethel at 4pm, I was able to arrive at Nubble Lighthouse on Cape Neddick, Maine by about 6:30.  This was 30 minutes before sunset. 

It was so awesome that I could spend the day skiing (a token picture below) and then hit the coast for a sunset drive.  There are not a lot of places on this earth (I don't imagine) where you can ski a major ski area and then be at the ocean photographing a lighthouse 2 1/2 hours later.



The drive was easy.  I had checked this all out with mapquest before driving from Massachusetts to Maine where my daughter lives.  From exit 7 on the Maine Turnpike (the York exit) it is only a 12 minute drive to the parking lot at the tip of Cape Neddick.  That is where this picture was taken.  The lighthouse itself is separated from the mainland by a narrow spit of water.  I'm not sure, but perhaps at low tide one can walk across.

I wasn't sure I would get a good picture. Though the sky over Sunday River Ski Area had been blue all day long, there were thick high clouds along the coast.  It was very dark when I arrived at the Cape Neddick parking lot.  But it's good to be patient.  With 15 minutes to go until sunset, the sun dropped below the cloud cover in the west and gave 5 minutes of bright light (the sides of the lighthouse and buildings seen here are facing west) before hitting more thick clouds near the horizon.

Taken 7 minutes before the "golden" opportunity seen below.

This lighting lasted no more than 5 minutes.
3 shot panorama, hand held, Olympus E-M5, 14-54II lens, F4, 1/125, ISO200



Larger images of all of these can be seen on my Web site here:

http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p85652418