David Zapatka has been photographing lighthouses up and down the East Coast for more than a decade. While countless photos have been taken of them during the day, he snaps images long after the sun has gone down.
“If you think of a lighthouse, it does its work at night, primarily,” Zapatka said. “To not have that recorded in history is a shame.”
Since 2013, Zapatka has photographed more than 175 lighthouses in the United States. His goal is to capture every working lighthouse across the country at night. The idea came to him while he was out boating with his wife on Narragansett Bay.
“So we’re anchored off Dutch Island and I said to my wife, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see if I can get shots of the Dutch Island Lighthouse at night under the stars?’” Zapatka said. “And I didn’t realize that this was a project until I was 15 or 20 lighthouses in. And that’s when I was doing more research on more lighthouses realizing, wow, there’s no pictures of this lighthouse.”
Zapatka is the president of the Friends of Plum Beach Lighthouse in North Kingstown. He has long been mesmerized by the beauty and history of lighthouses.
“There are so many others with these great stories behind them,” he said.
Zapatka said his photography project has not been done before.
“What the digital camera has allowed us to do was to open up to photographers this whole new field of shooting when the sun goes down,” Zapatka said.
What can’t be seen in Zapatka’s photos are the great lengths he goes to in capturing the images. “Early on, I realized that it’s dangerous at night,” he said.
Zapatka often wades knee-deep into the water to take a photo. Some lighthouses are only accessible by boat, which requires him to put his 20-foot tripod in the water.
“I can launch it off a boat, stick it down in the water and get a shot of the lighthouse from the water that you couldn’t normally get because your camera has to be completely steady for 20 seconds during (the) new moon phase,” Zapatka said.
Arriving at night at lighthouses is not for the faint of heart. Behind every photo are a host of safety measures — from a helmet with a headlamp to a personal radio beacon in the event of an emergency.
“The thrill is I’m creating this history right in front of my eyes that no one’s ever done before,” Zapatka said.
Photographing a lighthouse at night requires more than a skilled photographer and a good camera.
“Here’s what you need: new moon or close to it, low tide, slack tide, which means the tide has stopped, no clouds,” Zapatka said. “So why do you think it’s taken me eight years to do only 175 lighthouses roughly because it’s some of those conditions are so specific that you have to be patient to get that shot.”
And when it comes to patience, Zapatka has plenty of it.
“When I first started, I was self-teaching myself night photography and I knew there was a thing called light painting where you just use a flashlight,” Zapatka said. “If you show up to Beavertail Lighthouse and it’s dark and there’s no light, you can light the lighthouse just with using a flashlight by waving it back and forth and I did that originally at Beavertail.”
He had already shot about a dozen lighthouses when he realized he could also use his battery-powered television lights.
“I use those dim down to almost nothing,” Zapatka said. “You could barely read by these lights, but over the sensitivity and the long exposure that I’ve created within the camera sensor, that light goes a long way.”
But Zapata cautions that people should not expect images of a starry sky to look the same in person.
“The camera sees more than our eyes can see. So when you’re standing here looking at Beavertail Lighthouse in the middle of the night, the Milky Way is there and you can barely see it with your eyes, but the camera can see it better than you can because it’s seeing in this long exposure,” he said.
Zapatka’s photography collection was published in his first book in 2017, “Stars & Lights: Darkest of Dark Nights.” In 2020, he released the sequel: “Portraits from the Dark.” The project has been adopted by the United States Lighthouse Society and will live in their archives.
