Yaquina Bay Lighthouse

Author's Comments

The wooden lighthouses are different from the stone ones. They photograph as buildings first and beacons second, and Yaquina Bay is the clearest example of that I know of on this coast. The attached living quarters give it a domestic quality that the more famous Oregon lighthouses do not have. It looks like a house that happens to have a light on top, which is essentially what it was. I prefer it in late afternoon in September, when the summer fog has mostly burned off by midday and the western light comes in low across the bluff. The white siding takes the warm light beautifully, and the windows of the keeper's quarters start to glow from inside if the interior lamps are on. From the garden side you get the building in profile against the Pacific. From the beach trail below, you get it perched on the bluff with the bay opening out behind. Both are worth making. The photograph I keep trying to get is a tighter one. A detail of the upper windows and the lantern room with afternoon light raking across the clapboard, nothing else in the frame. The building has texture that a wide shot tends to flatten. Get close. Use a longer lens than feels natural for a lighthouse. Let the bluff and the bay become context rather than subject. The place has a reputation for being haunted and I will not weigh in on that except to say that wooden buildings on Pacific bluffs hold weather and history in a way stone does not, and you can feel it when you stand there at the end of a long afternoon.

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