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.

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.

Taken on the Cambridge side of the Charles River near the MIT boathouse while I was just wandering around and wondering if I really should be doing this whole photography thing.

Pulled myself out of bed way before dawn today and drove into Cambridge for the "Head of the Charles" rowing regatta. This is one of the first shots I got just before daybreak of the Charles River and the Western Avenue Bridge. I was standing on the Weeks Footbridge that crosses the Charles near Harvard University. The light streaks on the river on the right are from a couple of the rowing shells heading down to the start of the regatta near the BU Bridge.

Here’s a shot of the skyline of Boston’s Back Bay area taken from the Longfellow Bridge. It was just starting to really rain out, but the light was very interesting, how the orangeish-pink glow of the city bounce off the low-hanging clouds as the fog descended on the skyscrapers.

I don’t know why, but I always seem to be drawn to scenes of transition like this — water into earth, day into night, light into dark, buildings into clouds. I hope my camera has captured the energy I always feel during these transitional periods.

Back Harbor Reflections, originally uploaded by briburt.

Earlier in the summer, I took a long bike ride starting in Beverly, Massachusetts, up through Gloucester, around Cape Ann and then back through Essex (where I had a bowl of fabulous clam chowder at one of the roadside clam shacks), and then on to Ipswich, where I met up with Christina and Alex at the house of some friends of ours.

On the way, I passed through Rockport, which is one of the most picturesque little harbor towns north of Boston — so of course it was absolutely crawling with tourists. I had brought my camera with me in a pannier, and I spent some time walking around looking for photo opportunities that didn’t involve photographing the mob of people on the main drag. I got this shot by walking a little off the beaten path, toward Rockport’s Back Harbor, which is a little less busy than the main harbor.

I loved the colorful buildings and their reflections in the water — reminded me more of Portugal or somewhere on the Mediterranean than of Massachusetts — as well as the sense of serene isolation suggested by the boats. I hope I managed to catch it in this image.

OK. I was up before dawn this morning, photographing the sunrise, and it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit. So what did I do when I got home? Started processing photos of Cape Cod from last summer. Makes sense, I suppose. This is one of those photos.

Had a lot of fun with this one, deliberately breaking the "rule of thirds." To me, "rules" like this exist more as handy guidelines to get me going than hard-and-fast rules.

Runner Crossing Bridge at Sunset, originally uploaded by briburt.

I took this shot on the banks of the Charles River on the Boston side while heading toward the Charles River Esplanade for some night shots. The sun was just heading for the horizon, and the bridge made a nice silhouette with all that brightness behind it. It just so happened that a runner was passing by overhead, so I quickly snapped off a few frames to see if I could capture this moment without overexposing the sky. Well… this was the only one that really turned out OK.

I think I like best the balance between a kind of a zen-like serenity and the movement of the runner headed toward darkness on the other side of the bridge and the golden energy of the blazing sun reflected on the water.

Approaching Storm, originally uploaded by briburt.

This is a shot I got while wandering around the harbor on Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont, when we were on vacation there last week. A storm front was moving in fast, and I was afraid that we were going to get rained on, but as it turns out, the clouds blew over and the storm never happened.

I processed a number of versions of this, and it came down to this one, which emphasizes the blue of the ship on the right, versus a black and white version, which emphasizes the dramatic sky more. After consulting with Christina, we both agreed that this one is the better photo.

Taken with a Nikon 14-24 f/2.8 lens rented from LensProToGo — part of a prize I won in a photo contest sponsored by them. I highly recommend their service. They are a customer service company that rents lenses!

Rowes Wharf and Custom House Tower at Dusk, Boston, originally uploaded by briburt.

This is a shot of the Boston Financial District skyline taken on the Boston Harborwalk near Moakley Courthouse.

The clock tower in the center-right of the composition is the Custom House Tower. The tower has been through various iterations, but now houses a Marriott hotel.

I love taking photos of the city during the “blue hour.” The light always seems so palpable at this hour, and I hope I captured that feeling of falling blue light as the golden lights of the cityscape slowly rise in the air.

This photo was created by blending three bracketed exposures in Photomatix Pro and then doing further color and exposure adjustments in Adobe Lightroom.