Craighill Keeper’s bLog

Wow, it’s real! This will be (yet another) book on Maryland’s historic lighthouses. Check out the cover!

Click for full-size image.

As I’m moving along in research (I’ve already collected most of the photos I’ll need), I’ve been kind of sad to see how many cottage-style screwpiles once graced the Bay. I went into both the Nat’l Archives and Coast Guard Historian’s office armed with my list of every current and former MD lighthouse I could dig up, then pulled each file. As I opened some and caught initial glimpses of historic photos, I couldn’t help but whisper “Wowww!” and then instantly feel a pang of regret, knowing the structure no longer existed (or was merely the skeleton foundation). Only three exist now, which I knew, and Thomas Point is the only one left in its original location. The number of those lost is astounding, however. Some were so gorgeous and I would have loved to have seen them live and in person! I was born too late, I guess.

Now that the Craighill Cup is over, time to get back to organizing my photos and writing captions! Two months to deadline…. I’m going to try to be a little unique in this one and mention the NHLPA and which lighthouses are preserved/maintained and open to the public.

Over the last several years, I’ve become an avid amateur photographer. I use a Mac laptop and heavily utilized iPhoto as my “organizer”, but the editing capabilities were slim. I then had to purchase a little software gadget called “iPhoto Library Manager” because I filled up my hard drive and had no way to archive photos off and still be able to open them in the iPhoto library (which kept the organization structure). This software allowed me to have multiple iPhoto libraries, so I could have one for baseball, one for lighthouses, one for family trips, etc. and store them on an external firewire drive. Still, I found tagging photos with keywords arduous and a task often ignored. So my photo library became quite a mess as the years went on. My workflow consisted of offloading a card into the local iPhoto on my laptop and creating an album, then at some later date (usually when the hard drive was threatening to fill again), I would copy the album to a library on the external drive and then go through and delete the original photos on the hard drive. Time-consuming and not fun.

Then my mom (a 35mm photographer who is just entering the digital world) suggested I start shooting in RAW mode after being shown all the capabilities. That was fine and good, but I had to use a converter for my Canon’s CR2 RAW files before I could then use the photos in Photoshop. Blah - again, too much.

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