My favorite light house.

[Dan Levesque]

New here. Been lurking for a bit. Some recent shots of the much photographed Portland Head Light in Portland, ME. For some reason I really like shooting this light. I am going to visit a few other area lights this Spring, but here's a start for the year. The pics are from two different days.

1.

2.

3.

 

[Edward Bussa]

Dan,

Beautiful lighthouse - thoughtfully composed I might add.

I like the directional light on #1.

I've always wanted to adventure in Maine...

 

[Asher Kelman]

Dan,

I'm impressed with your first post and the images of the lighthouse. Welcome. This is a great start. could you describe the setting of the first picture. Was this in the evening and did you use a polarizing filter?

I wonder whether you have more pictures from that position that might include some of the adjacent landscape in the first two photographs at least to complete the end of the rock formations meeting the water?

This is a great project.

Asher

 

[Dan Levesque]

Thank you for the comments.

Asher. It was morning, between 8:30 and 9:00. I did use a CPL. The second day was late afternoon / evening. I was hoping for similar conditions as the morning shots, so the North face would be lit, but the weather was not cooperating! It had rained the whole day. I will have to re shoot on a sunny day.

I do have some shot at a wider angle showing more of the rocks. Thanks for looking!

1.

2.

 

[Georg R. Baumann]

Welcome Dan, and congrats on finding this outstanding Lighthouse. What a beautiful home this is in deed!

Hope you can manage to go there when the sea is rough and get some shots of high waves crushing against the rocks, which would be a nice contrapoint to the calm and peaceful scene you shot here.

You remind me of 2 lighthouses here that I plan to shoot since a while.... Thanks!

 

[Barry Johnston]

Lighthouse...

Bonjour Dan.... and Welcome !!

Wow!! what an impressive set of photos here. I like all of them...beautifully composed and sharp.

Lighthouses are indeed beautiful and I wish we had some as nice as this one where I live.
Would you mind displaying some of the EXIF info please. I'd really like to see what camera/lens equipment you are using.

Many Thanks,
Barry.

 

[Dan Levesque]

Thanks for the comments! This is a cool light house, lots of pictures of it around. It was a military installation at one point and a Coast Guard base at another. There are some interesting ruins to photograph at the site as well.

Barry.

EXIF data. The particulars are a bit different over the two days and pic to pic. In general, I was in AV mode using an aperture of f/5.6 to f/11. ISO 100 for the sunny day with a CPL mounted. I bumped the ISO to 200 for the overcast day; obviously the CPL was of no use here. My camera is pretty much locked to Center Weighted Average and I will normally apply EC for the shots with a lot of sky. For these I shot RAW / Lg. JPEG, but ended up not using any of the RAW files. The JPEGs worked fine. For JPEG parameters, I have a custom tone curve loaded into my camera that gives pretty good results right out of the box. Very little Post Processing here. Maybe a tweak in levels, a bit of saturation on some, resize and USM.

Gear. Canon 1DMKII. All the shots posted were with my 24-70L.