• The adventure of light, and nature

    Alone with his camera, he stopped at another bend on the path around the moat.  He’d left his friend rigging fishing poles to catch their supper back at their campsite. Here, he thought, would be a good place for a sunset shot. 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. 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…