Photographers put a lot of planning into an outing — scouting locations, checking tide charts, deciding on gear ahead of time, all in service of the specific shot in your head. Then you show up, get set up, dial in your exposure and composition, and wait for the light. Sometimes that plan goes right out the window.
Sometimes the plan was bad to begin with — trust me, I’ve had plenty of bad ideas over the years. It’s fine to be wrong. It’s fine to fail. You learn from it. And sometimes the weather just doesn’t cooperate — the radar looks clear, you glance out the window at gorgeous puffy clouds, you rush to the spot, and by the time the light’s right every cloud has vanished. Happens to everyone.
But every once in a while, the world hands you something better than the plan. That happened to me on a recent morning at Conimicut Point in Warwick, working on a shot of the lighthouse as low tide lined up with sunrise.
While I waited for the sun, I heard a low engine rumble behind me and turned to find a little red tugboat steaming straight toward me. Lighthouse? What lighthouse. I forgot about it entirely and swapped to my 70-200mm telephoto — this was where the shot was going to happen.
I’m a little fascinated by tugboats — stubby little ships doing work way out of proportion to their size. I see them all the time pushing bigger ships around Providence Harbor on my commute, and I’d tried to photograph one before at the fishing village of Galilee, but never one actually underway. This time the same low tide that got me close to the lighthouse also put me close to the tug. As it came past, the sun crossed the horizon and lit up the whole front of the boat as it powered down Narragansett Bay.
Be bold. Be strong. Be a tug boat.