The lighthouse bug!

Somehow, I've caught the lighthouse bug! Since moving to the east coast I've had a lot of chances to visit different lighthouses - mostly on Cape Cod and others along the shoreline in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Whenever I visit a lighthouse I think about what life in a lighthouse for the keepers must have been like a few hundred years ago - undoubtedly lonely ... on most days - I'd presume. Looking out into an empty, dangerous sea... Standing on the brink of humanity on one side and a vast expanse of nothingness on the other...

But think about what a lighthouse would have meant to somebody lost at sea, looking for land... A tiny flicker of light signaling rescue and life. And yet there are innumerable stories of devastation, when ships misjudged the rocks and the location of the lighthouse and directly slammed into them, throwing sailors into ice cold water. So maybe my conjecture is more romanticized than real. But that still does not preclude me from finding these beautiful beasts really really fascinating!

Have you ever seen/visited a lighthouse? I do not know why they are almost always white in color! Makes a good contrast with the sea, the land and a beautiful blue sky when you are taking a picture. That being the purpose of this blog, I want to share a few pictures I've taken this summer. I have another post on lighthouses, so I won't include the same ones again...

Woods End Light in Provincetown on Cape Cod

Portsmouth Harbor Light in New Hampshire

World view through the Portsmouth Light window

Stairs leading up to the top of the Highland Light (inside the lighthouse) on Cape Cod, Massachusetts

In case you are interested in finding out a little bit more about different lighthouses on the New England coastline, please see this website. It is maintained by Jeremy D'Entremont and has lots of historical information, pictures and conservation information. I incidentally met Mr. D'Entremont while visiting the Portsmouth Harbor light and he gave us his visiting card, but I didn't even look at it until after we got home! I admire all the lighthouse pictures he has taken for his website and did not even know I was talking to him!

While I was writing this post, I realized that I knew nothing about lighthouses back home! Never heard of any... India has a long coastline and boasted a strong trade and commerce destination through ages. So there have to be at least some lighthouses around. A quick google search revealed a treasure! Here's a link hosted on the University of North Carolina server by Dr. Russ Rowlett who is a mathematics professor. This website has tons of information about lighthouses in many different countries! If you have a little bit of time, click on a few links - the variety of the structures in different parts of the world is impressive, to say the least... I stand corrected - white seems to be the way for New England lighthouses, but others around the world are much more colorful! Needless to say, I'll be spending some time on this website in the next few days... wonder if anybody is actually taking care of these national treasures back home...

Picturesque Nantucket

The island of Nantucket is situated just off of the East coast of the U.S., near the Massachusetts border. We drove down to Harwich port from Boston and then took a ferry ride to the island. Home to beautiful 17th century architecture, picturesque beaches, quaint shops, light houses and the juice guys (!), Nantucket island is a photographer's dream come true.
I've been smitten by anything New England-y/Lighthouse-y since last Summer (that's when I first saw the light houses on Cape Cod) and when I saw an advertisement for a sandcastle festival being held on Nantucket, we just had to go see it! We went to Jetties beach, where the sandcastle festival was being held. Micheal Phelps and the Olympics were a favorite choice of sand sculpture, while we also saw Nantucket based themes, popular literature (Moby 'Brick') , a sea turtle and a Ganesha sand sculpture!!!We rented a couple of bikes and roamed around the island a little bit - went to the Surfside beach which is known for its big waves... While coming back on the ferry, a hailstorm caught up with us! And guess what - in a true amateur fashion, I made use of that opportunity for taking pictures :-) Oh, by the way, I've finally decided to upload my pictures to Flickr. So now you can take a look at the Nantucket photostream here.

Black and white and beautiful?

If my world wasn't so colorful, would it be beautiful still?

Disclaimer: This picture wasn't taken on a B&W film, just a quick conversion to blank & white in picasa.

I converted this picture to a black and white image to see how it would look without the color. I've heard such good feeling toward B&W photography among serious photographers - its almost a holy grail - for those who attempt B&W are in an entirely different league! We had tried our hand at one B&W film for our Canon Rebel a few years ago and nothing significant came out of it. Now of course, B&W film + developing/printing is expensive than color - so we let it go at that. But it has been at the back of my mind since then.

I've seen beautiful B&W photographs in the Central Pennsylvania Festival of Arts held each year in State College, PA. Renowned photographers converge in the happy valley (home to the Penn State Nittany Lions) each year for this festival and strut their art. While I have marveled at the B&W pictures, I've also realized that not all pictures would look good on a B&W film. So I tried converting a lot of different kind of pictures (people, flowers, buildings, sea shore etc) in my collection to B&W and most of them just looked pale and uninviting. This picture however, which I took on Cape Cod last year, became mildly more interesting than its colored counterpart. Here's the colored version - take your pick!
Do we like color or B&W? Does it convey a different emotion? As I've said before - I'm a fan of sunlight - and when we take away the color - we take away the light almost! But beauty is in the eye of the beholder... Try some on your own... Authentic B&W film if possible, but digitally converted at least...

World view

I took this picture during our Cape Cod trip last summer. Thank god for digital cameras (!) 'cause I took so many pictures that day that I would have spent a fortune on film. Some wise man (or a woman - the feminist in me exclaimed) has aptly said "when you take 50 shots you'll probably get one that is brilliant"... I found that to be true in this trip. The total number of pictures I took that day go into 100s, but there are only a few pictures that I actually like. So, coming to the point, this is one of those pictures that I really like.

We were inside one of the lighthouses and looking out through the viewing windows. I took pictures thro' most of the available windows, but many of them were looking into parking lots or roads and the composition of the picture was not good enough. But here, I found the right amount of light and shadow and tried to make use of the inside-outside point of view.

The Beautiful Cape Cod & Its Lighthouses

I was watching the Travel channel on TV today and they were showing some nice sunny and warm (!) places... Ah, that's just what I needed to get out of this dreary mood all the rain and cloudiness brings to me. We just spent our Summer in Boston and a lil' bit in Florida and in San Francisco. Yep, I had a glorious summer. One nice Saturday morning, we decided to drive down to Cape Cod. Here are a few pictures I took with my digital camera*...
This is a charming view of the Highland Light/Cape Cod Light. Is there something like a perfect picture? I've been hoping to take one... Of course, until now I wasn't as invested in photography as some of the amateurs are. But now I've decided to put some effort and make every shot count!

This is another view of the Highland Light/Cape Cod Light. Just a simple trick of foreground/ background comparison. I always wonder - are accidental pictures better or planned ones like the one above. Once I realized that contrasting the foreground and background created a nice effect, that's all I could think of that day. So I clicked a lot of pictures like this one.


I love this picture! Before going to Cape Cod I had seen some pictures on travel websites and I had fallen in love with those... So I was trying to "score" an awesome picture - the one that I could boast about... And this one turned out to be one of them! I took a lot of pictures at this venue and realized that framing the lighthouse with the wooden fence looked so much better than just the lighthouse. And the bonus was the contrast between some green and rest brown grass...

To me, this looks like a perfect place to live! Ah, Cape Cod - I'll come back to visit you again.

* I have changed the saturation on some of these pictures.