Studies in Spirals

Spiral Staircase in the Currituck Beach Light Station
Spiral Staircase in the Currituck Beach Light Station, Corolla, N.C. | Panasonic Lumix G1 and Olympus 9-18mm f/4-5.6 lens @ 9mm; exposed 1/20 sec. @ f/4, ISO 800.

While I had been up to the top of the lighthouse in Racine, Wis. before, when presented with the opportunity to go up to the top of another lighthouse in the Outer Banks, specifically the Currituck Beach Light Station in Corolla, N.C. (pronounced cuh-ra-lah, unlike the car by Toyota), I just couldn’t resist.  Sure, it was $7 per person, which is a bit steep, but Elizabeth and I were able to set our own pace.  There were no “groups” that went up–there are landings after every flight of stairs, so people can pass in both directions.  This is decidedly different from the lighthouse back home, which was much narrower.

In the end, these are my two favorite images.  Note that they’re both surprisingly sharp given an exposure time of 1/20 second.  If I had taken the Olympus PEN EP-2 along for this trip, I suppose that wouldn’t have been so great a feat to have a sharp image at such a slow shutter speed, but the Panasonic Lumix G1 does not have built-in image stabilization (instead, they put the stabilization mechanisms in the individual lenses, like Canon and Nikon).  That is a decided advantage of the Olympus method for image stabilization, but I like having the flip-out screen on the Lumix that the PEN series lacks.  To each their own.

As always, comments and criticism welcome!

Spirals in Black and White
Currituck Beach Light Station, Corolla, N.C. | Panasonic Lumix G1 and Olympus 17mm f/2.8 lens; exposed 1/20 @ f/5.6, ISO 400.