Marshall Point Lighthouse, Maine, originally uploaded by briburt (Brian Burt Photo).

When we took a mini-vacation up to the Maine coast a couple of months ago, I made a point to seek out as many lighthouses as I could to photograph. This one is Marshall Point Lighthouse near Port Clyde, Maine, and is quite interesting in that it is very accessible. At low tide, you can walk all the way around it on the rocks and even go up and walk out on the wooden walkway to the light house door. (Click here for some more information on Marshall Point Lighthouse.)

Photographing these lighthouses is an enlightening experience for me as I am constantly trying to get to angles that are not just your typical “lighthouse shot” and to see the structure in different ways.

Lighthouses are in and of themselves dramatic structures both in their location and in their function, so shooting them seems like it should be a pretty straightforward affair. But it’s more complicated than it looks, mainly because often the lighthouses are hard to access (surrounded, for instance, by steep drop offs and cliffs) in a way that allows you to get new and interesting views of them.

Lighthouses have also been favorite subjects for visual artists, and most have been photographed or painted many times over, so it’s often hard to get a new view. Luckily, I was helped out by a very unique sky and also by my super wide Sigma 10-20 lens, which at 10mm helps to capture this drama by creating this sort of rush of energy in almost any cloud-filled sky.

On this particular evening, the sky was really quite dramatic, with a storm front being pushed out by a low pressure system. In this photo, you can see the storm clouds moving off to the right, and I wanted to capture both the drama of the sky’s contrast as well as the sharp lines of the walkway to the lighthouse itself, which lead the eye out to the energy of the sky.

This is a night shot of the "Great Dome" and columns of Building 10 (The Maclaurin Building) on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as seen from the south side of Memorial Drive. The red and orange-ish/white streaks in the foreground are the headlights and tail lights of cars passing by on Memorial Drive.

I was out last Saturday wanting to get night shots of the Boston skyline across the Charles River, and I was so focused on looking south that I wasn’t looking the other direction and almost missed this shot. Just goes to show that you should always turn away from whatever it is you set out to do, and you might just find something more interesting staring you right in the face.

These are some children having fun in Rings Fountain, part of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, which, as part of the Big Dig project, replaced a truly hideous elevated freeway that sliced through the heart of Boston.

This is part of the Greenway know as the Great Room, which has at its core a "lighted, choreographed fountain shooting 30 to 40 feet in the air designed by Wet Design. The 64 nozzles are set in three circles of rose-colored stone inlaid at surface level. Since each nozzle works independently, there are innumerable design configurations possible with the jets of spray. The fountain is air powered vs. water-pressure powered, so the result is a light spray." More info available here in this PDF.

Taken as part of the one-year anniversary photowalk of the Boston, Massachusetts, Flickr group. (Thanks to Greg for organizing this!)

I really love the details brought out by the light reflected in the water. Kind of a cool effect, I think.

An MBTA Red Line train heads into a blazing sunset over the Longfellow Bridge from Boston into Cambridge.

Featured on the MIT Engineering department’s home page.

Took a needed break from the daily grind and headed up to the mid-coast of Maine with my family last weekend and decided it was time to check out some of the lighthouses that dot that part of the New England coast.

This is a shot of one of the better known lighthouses in all of New England — the Pemaquid Point Light Station. (The lighthouse has become so iconic for Maine, that its outline actually graces the U.S. commemorative quarter coin for the State of Maine).

As for the details surrounding this image, it was all very serendipitous — we just happened to be passing close by on our way home so we decided to go for it and stop here for a picnic lunch. It just so happened that the tide was still low, which exposed all of these very cool striated granite rocks and enabled me to climb down the cliff to get this cool angle. And a bonus was that the sky was also very dramatic as rain squalls moved in and out of the area.

The lighting was a bit of a challenge as the sun kept appearing and disappearing and reappearing from behind clouds, but I just shot and shot and shot and experimented with lowering the exposure settings on my camera to ensure that the light in the clouds would not get all blown out.

But the biggest bonus was my wonderful ultra-wide zoom lens: the Sigma 10-20mm. When zoomed all the way out to 10mm, it provides a sort of “rushing to the center” effect between land and sky that is accentuated here by the striations on the rocks and the lines of the sky.

Overall, a very satisfying place to take photos, and with some excellent conditions to obtain the kinds of photos I like to make.

The 72-foot, 3-deck ship is run by Massachusetts Bay Lines and is a replica of an old-time steamboat. It actually does not use steam for power, though it does use a paddlewheel.

I saw this vessel from a distance while wandering along Fort Point Channel in Boston, seeing what I could see and taking photos. The ship was so full of golden light and detail amidst the darkness of the harbor that I just had to try and get a shot.

This proved more difficult than I had at first thought, as I needed a fairly long exposure, and the boat was rocking ever so slightly in the water. So I experimented and took around 15 exposures at varying lengths of exposure.

This is the sharpest among all of those shots with the exposure fairly even across the whole frame, though it’s still a bit soft around the center of the exposure. I tried to compensate for this a bit by lowering the exposure a bit in this area and sharpening using Adobe Lightroom, so it’s not super noticeable in the smaller sizes.

In any case, I liked the light and color and sharpness in the rest of the frame so much that I just had to post it, despite the lack of sharpness in some areas of the boat itself.

Another dusk shot of the Moakley Bridge in Boston bathed in that wonderful blue light that I love so much. Don’t know why they have the blue floodlights on the bridge, but it certainly does catch my eye when I’m there.

A shot of a random commuter waiting for an an MBTA Red Line train taken on the platform at Alewife Station in Cambridge, MA, with my iPhone camera. There’s something about this shot that I find appealing, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe the sort of haunting feeling of isolation it evokes? Not sure what it is, but it pleases me.

If you’re interested in seeing some other shots I’ve experimented with using my iPhone camera, see a small collection of my photos on The Best Camera site, which posts only photos taken with an iPhone.

An MBTA Red Line train crosses the Longfellow Bridge from Cambridge into Boston on a gray day.

Yup. More light trails.

Taken on a stroll up the Charles River in Cambridge around the Longfellow Bridge on a chilly February evening.