The adventure of light, and nature

The sea-rock and limestone path he walked around defined the moat at old Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.  Fifteen paces back along the moat wall, he set up his camera on the tripod. He set the exposure for fifteen seconds and walked back to where the path turned into the sea and posed with his back to the camera, his face to the setting sun. 

Alone with his camera, he stood at another bend in the path around the moat.   Here, was perfect, he thought.  Here was a good place for a sunset shot.

He focused across the flat, steel-blue sea.  A long grey cloud edged the horizon. As the sun set, sunlight patterned the sky and the sea, darker at his feet and above and orange and blue and white just above the cloud.

He stood in the quiet lee of the fort.  The sea lay flat, blocked from the wind by the fort’s high masonry wall; sixteen million bricks, and still unfinished.  Above the rampart, the wind gusted twenty knots or better.  The wind hummed out across the gulf.

The sea changed hues as the sun dropped. The sky above the cloud seemed to be trying to hold onto the color of the sea. 

He could not hear the click of the camera shutter for the heavy wind.

Fifteen seconds were more than up.  He walked back to his camera. He pushed in the tripod legs and continued walking around the bend into the push of the wind. He was not hungry for anything but more light. 

He had left his father back at camp rigging rods for fishing from the big dock where you could fish after the Yankee Freedom Catamaran returned to Key West each afternoon. He would help his father fish for their supper in the school of mangrove snapper that hung out around the dock pilings. 

He knew he had been gone too long and that his father would no doubt already be cooking the snapper in a pan over the campsite grill.

His father was a good fisherman. They would surely be eating snapper for supper.

Photo by Ian Wilson. See more photos by Wilson on Instagram.