The light below the lookout
Down from the busy Prospect Point lookout, on the rocks closer to the water, sits the small navigation light that marks the point for ships coming through the First Narrows. It is easy to miss from up top, where everyone is looking at the Lions Gate Bridge, but from the right angle it makes a better subject than the famous view above it, a small, functional beacon set against the moving water of one of the busiest stretches of the harbour.
Small subject, careful placement
A light this small in the frame lives or dies on composition. There is no drama in the object itself, so the picture depends on where you set it against the water, the far shore, and the sky, and how much space you give it. That kind of precise placement is exactly what a large format ground glass is for. You see the whole frame at once, upside down and reversed, and you can move the camera a few degrees at a time until the light sits exactly where it needs to against everything around it.
How it was made
This was shot on Kodak Portra 160 at f/22, which is the more sensible aperture for this kind of scene, enough depth of field to hold the near rocks and the far water together, and enough of a stop down to keep the whole frame sharp without pushing into the softness you get at the very smallest apertures. Portra keeps the colours restrained, which suits a grey coastal light, and it has the latitude to hold both the bright water and the shadowed rock without a fight.
Water as the hard part
The First Narrows moves fast, with strong tidal current running through it, so the water around the point is never still. That decides the exposure as much as the light does. A moderate shutter speed keeps some texture in the surface without freezing it into chaos, and the slight movement in the water becomes part of what tells you this is a working channel, not a calm bay.
The quieter frame
Given the choice between the grand view from the lookout and this small light on the rocks below it, I usually take the smaller subject. The big view is already in everyone’s camera. A modest navigation light doing its job at the edge of the narrows is the kind of thing that rewards slowing down and framing carefully on a sheet of film, and it says more about the working harbour than another frame of the bridge ever could.
Camera: Gibellini AG810
Lens: Fujifilm W 360mm f6.3
Film: Kodak Portra 160
Developer: C41
Developed at: 160 ISO
Number of interruptions of people asking about the camera: 0
Exposure time: 1/30s
Bellows Extension Factor: 0
Aperture: f/22
Digitized: SilverFast 9
Post Process: Photoshop
It is worth noting that Stanley Park has more than one of these harbour lights, and I have photographed the one at Brockton Point on the east side as well. Together they bracket the park, one marking the turn into the inner harbour, this one watching the fast water of the First Narrows on the west. Shooting both on the same slow film process is a way of treating them as a pair, two small, functional structures doing the same quiet job at opposite ends of the same great park, each easy to overlook and each worth stopping for.