e-510 36mm 1/320 f/8 iso 400

Taking my first departure from the 12mm focal length in quite a while, I here present arguably PEI's most iconic light, the West Point Lighthouse. Marking the western entrance to Northumberland Straight, West Point was built in 1875, automated in 1963 and in 1984, with a reconstructed keeper's house became an inn, restaurant and museum.

The museum was very well done, itself spread up the climb up the tower. Two of the inn's rooms are in the tower too, and the view from the lantern room nearly 70 feet above the dunes was exciting, though for some reason the top was full of houseflies, like a hundred or so. The restaurant was so-so, one of those cases were I regretted not asking the server which entree was her favourite, which I doubt would have been the overdone-then-brushed with Kraft Barbeque sauce pork chops I had. I never order pork chops in a restaurant, probably since they're on few menus, ergo when I found them just there I suspected they must be a specialty of the house and therefore awesome. For the record, my travelling companion found her lobster much less mauvais, and by the looks of the stuffed crepes going to all the other tables I think I seriously erred in my order.

Today's picture was framed by wanting a unique view of West Point, the lighthouse that graces the cover of the lighthouse guide I bought at the next stop after this one as well as just about every tourist brochure. I also composed around the little enterprise this station has become; hardly some Disney-esque corporate horror, and the light itself still maintained by the coast guard, it is all the same an ongoing enterprise with a substantial, if dirt parking lot and an awful lot of tourists in the way of most of the more obvious shots. Awful lot here meaning maybe seven, this is PEI after all, eight if you count me, which is eight more than the first 100 years this station was in operation.

I would like on this occasion to acknowledge the help of Davin Greenwell in examining the sampling for the resize of this photo. In fact, I asked him to do it for me in CS2 as my copy of CS3 isn't running so well on the old laptop due to some recent OS issues and I'm back to running PS7 on this machine. There is a quad-core behemoth in the other room with a crazy 8gb of ram and 1.27 gigawatts of I don't know what the hell, but its monitor, while modernish and LCD, is plain 'ol Samsung Synchmaster ugly in colour. A nod but not a credit, as to my eye and my monitor here in the office PS7 did just as good a job in this web reduction. Many mahalos to my dear friend all the same.

I did though, after he'd right off the camera rendered, also ask Davin to take some PP license and send me what he came up with. And while not featured here, I appreciated his vision, it was indeed a tite rendering, a remix if you will. And suddenly I sense an ellipsis followed by an oft of late underutilized extrametrical red dot segue sequence…

 

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A long time ago I put it out there for me to select a photo, a raw file in fact, and release it unto my viewers tabula rosa to see what you could do in post-processing. This isn't the one but the next one is. I'm finally getting around to it, but it's not going to be a raw in this case, just a jpeg that out of the camera is just a bit too much. The colours are too much, the contrast is too much, there are (recoverable, even in jpeg) highlights blown, and just to make that entry adjustment easy, the horizon is off by a bit. It's not the camera's fault, I was shooting something else not long before and I'd twisted the settings a bunch and I forgot to twist them back when I came across what was some of the best lighting and colour of the whole trip, along with a very beautiful lighthouse. And seriously, I keep waiting for the Photoshop plug-in that makes things look just like they do in the LCD on the camera.

But that's nextpost, days away. Today's photo makes for a subtle print even at 11x14; all the same it has been effective, it has sparked dozens of conversations and moved four units so far.