Peggys Point Lighthouse Sunset Silhouette, Nova Scotia, Canada 2019.

It was a cloudless but very windy day at Peggys Point (Peggys Cove) that day. The lighthouse sits on a rocky point of land but is set back several hundred yards from the water allowing you to photograph it from all sides. The point is attached to the mainland on its east side but as you can walk around all sides of the lighthouse you have a large choice of shooting vantage points but almost all of them are lower requiring you to shoot upwards to get the lighthouse in the frame. But as there were no clouds, the sky was quite boring, even at sunset.

After shooting from the North, the South, and the West and getting several classic golden light shots of the tower with jumbled rocks in the foreground full of tourists and a boring blank sky, the sun had vanished below the horizon. So, it was time to go. Many of those shots were good but not great. As I walked back to the parking lot along the trail, I figured what the heck and turned around to find that finally there were no tourists milling about the base of the lighthouse so I stopped with my tripod to take one more shot.

I set up the tripod, framed the lighthouse but during that time a lone photographer entered the scene. So, a quick re-positioning of my gear got some separation between the lone figure and the lighthouse and as luck would have it positioned him in the orange part of the last remnants of light from the sunset.

In this shot, I love how the sky melds from deep blue into bright orange. And by under exposing in order to bring out those rich colors the lighthouse and person became pure silhouettes with strong graphical structure that tells a story.