Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Lighthouses of Portsmouth and Portland Tour on Ooh.com


My company, New England Lighthouse Tours, is featured on a new website, ooh.com. I've announced the dates for my "Lighthouses of Portsmouth & Portland" tours for 2010, and I'll be announcing more tours soon. I plan to offer some new trips, including some 2-day trips to various parts of New England.

Photo of the Day: Minot's Ledge Light, Massachusetts


357_5720adj, originally uploaded by nelights.

I'm always drawn to offshore, wave-swept lighthouses like Minot's. I'm fascinated by the lives the keepers led at these places. Lighthouse keeping at these places was rough, physically and psychologically -- not the romantic picture many people have of the job.

I took this photo during a sunset cruise I narrated for the Thacher Island Association a couple of years ago. We left Gloucester, Mass., at 6 p.m. and got to Boston Light about sunset, and it didn't look like we'd have time to make it all the way to Minot's, a few more miles south, off the shores of Scituate and Cohasset. But the captain decided to go for it, and we still had some light left when we got to Minot's, as you can see. Because the light was so low, my photos were very noisy -- I had to reduce the noise in Photoshop in order to make this photo presentable. But I did very little manipulation of the color -- this is a pretty accurate picture of the beautiful sunset that evening. You can see the Boston skyline in the distance.