Finding Some Joy While out in the Dark


It’s been a long year, and also a very fast year. Like many of you, I’m looking forward to the holiday break even more than usual. 


To get myself into the spirit, I’ve spent several (very cold!) evenings out shooting the holiday decorations (mostly lights but also that very famous lobster pot tree) that have popped up all over Provincetown in the past few weeks. 


We had a very dry and relatively warm Fall, which meant that there were days in November when I was wondering if we could get in one more beach day. Alas, we didn’t, and when the weather shifted it SHIFTED. 


I went from running in shorts and a t-shirt to needing my gloves and hot-hands seemingly overnight. The trees quickly dropped their leaves and suddenly we were putting up the pine greens while quickly moving our pumpkins out of sight. 


And I suddenly felt free to go shoot the holiday lights around town and just have fun with that, rather than doing something that felt more important or serious. I mean, a lot of the time I’m just out having fun with my camera, and I make photos of things that I like and help me feel good, or that I find interesting. 


But for some reason–perhaps after the election earlier last month and my quest to capture some natural beauty to help me process what was happening–I just felt a looseness in my shooting of the holiday scenes. Which is interesting, given that the lighting conditions are a challenge, since I’m trying to have it bright enough to see the decorations and dark enough to see the lights that are involved. It’s a balance and depends a lot on late-day cloud cover, as well as timing generally and how bright the light is right around the scene I want to shoot.


Here are a dozen or so that I especially like, often because they are either very subtle or very obvious. I like the extremes! Most are from earlier this month, but a couple are from 2022 or 2023. 


Have a great holiday season, and thank you for reading along!


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