This image is part of an ongoing personal series I'm working on that I'm calling "The Long Watch"

Rather than documenting a specific moment or location, I'm interested in what these buildings represent - structures designed to stand alone, to face weather and time without movement. They stand, resilient against the elements. A lonely life along the sea.

The scene is intentionally constructed, allowing me to step away from geographic accuracy and focus on mood, symbolism, and emotional truth.

So far all of the images in this project are older lighthouse images that I have take and I have decided to edit them in this "fine art" black and white style. To create the scene I meticulously cut out the parts of the scene I want to keep with the pen tool in photoshop. Sometimes it's just the lighthouse, sometimes I keep other parts of the scene, it just depends on what I think looks good when I'm experimenting with it. Doing this allows me to get rid of any/all distractions. Just focusing on the lighthouse.

I normally do the black and white conversion in Lightroom first, then take the images in photoshop where I cut out the scene I want to keep. Once I have my scene I usually replace the sky with a solid black layer. Then using a multitude of gradient tools I experiment with making an illusion of light coming into the scene. On top of that I also take other long exposure skies that I've shot from other locations and insert them into the sky as well. I usually transform, stretch, rotate, and just play with the long exposure sky until I find something that I think works.

Once I have my sky to my liking I basically just take multiple curve layers and do some selective dodge and burning. And that is essentially it. I feel like it's important to note that I don't use the exact same process for each image. Some I've taken in a different direction than others but this is more or less the process I take in creating these types of images. There are a bunch of others in my portfolio here if you are interested.