One evening, a half-hour after the tourists had applauded the sunset at Menemsha Beach, students of Alison Shaw’s photo workshop were busy talking to each other and changing lenses. They didn’t notice the crimson glow on the horizon was building in intensity by the minute. For three decades, Shaw has chased light around the Island. Now she knew. Running down the beach, she screamed, “Shoot now! Shoot now! I don’t care what exposure you’ve got it on, just shoot!” Thirty seconds was all they had. Yet they stalled.  

Shaw’s photo students come from all over the country seeking the essence of the light on and around the Vineyard, and still, here to record it, it catches them unaware. “They say the Vineyard’s the most beautiful place they’ve ever shot,” says Shaw, whose home and studio are in Oak Bluffs. “They say they have more keepers here than anywhere else.”

“Is Island light better or different than all other places?” asks West Tisbury painter Allen Whiting, who’s spent a lifetime capturing the landscape of light on canvas. “You’d have to know all other places to answer that. But there is a certain kind of light where sea meets land. Like our fingerprints, each place is different, but they all start out with the same basic pattern.” The sea meets land in many of the places where Whiting paints – here, there, and everywhere. “The Caribbean paintings have a soft pastel water light,” says Whiting. “The Maine paintings have dark blue water light that looks frigid. A Vineyard painting might have a white sky and dark blue water light illuminating the dune grass, showing the contrast.”

I asked James Edson, a marine meteorologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, if there might be a scientific explanation as to why the light looks so different on these three basic Whiting canvases. The shallowness of the white sandy bottom in the Caribbean, Edson says, causes a reflection of aqua tones in the surf unlike those around the Vineyard, where the ocean floor drops off more quickly, creating a deeper blue. In Maine, seaweed plays a role in making the waters seem darker than they do around the Island, where the water is generally clearer.

But that’s just part of it. Permanent facts of life play a role: The Vineyard is flat, so the light is not obscured by mountains or obstructions. “Our field of view is not affected by shadows,” says Edson. “Sunsets are not competing with trees. Light bounces from ocean to sky to our eyes.” The moisture in aerosols and airborne sea salt (called marine haze) scatters the light in particular ways offshore, as do the methods by which it bounces off waves and wavelets. During summer, the light changes on the Vineyard as the surrounding water warms up. “In July the flow off the land is cool and dry, and the water is also cool, so the light is dry and crisp,” says Edson. “In August, you tend to get a southwest flow with predominant winds off the ocean. Since the water has warmed by then, you get a lot of sticky days, and typically a lot of haze. During the transitional seasons of spring and fall, you get big swings in weather patterns with the northeast flow changing to southwest and back to northeast, or what’s called bimodal wind distribution, which leads to crisper outbreaks of light.” That’s why the light here is so dynamic – unlike, say, the day-to-day sameness of it under a steady Florida sun.

But Edson agrees that light is very much a subjective experience. “A lot of our perception of the light comes from being outside longer in the summertime,” says Edson. “The days are longer. We’re on vacation, so the light looks better. Everything looks better. Even a foggy day feels better.”

Photographers often go in search of fog for its mysterious diffusion of light. “I would go to bed listening to the weather,” says Michael Zide, a longtime Vineyard photographer, now based in Amherst, who works in black and white. “If there were conditions that suggested fog in the morning, I would force myself to get up early and go out into it. Any time the weather was bad was a good time to be shooting. Rain. Mist. Cold. Ice and snow. Anything that makes you a bit uncomfortable makes for wonderful discoveries of light.”

Acting on that principle, Zide captured stunning light shows around the Island from the end of the 1960s through the early 1980s. He was among the first of the notable fine-art photographers to put down a year-round stake on the Island. Arriving here after driving cross-country from California, he found it difficult to get his bearings at first. Out West the scale and scope of the landscape had offered dramatic shots wherever he turned. On the Island, the light was different. He was forced to look deeper. He was attracted especially to the light of the off-season when the beaches were free of footprints and the icy landscapes reflected the remoteness and isolation he often felt here. He bought a pair of fireman’s boots in which to tramp the marshes and shores, breaking through ice and snow, sloshing out into the ocean, digging his tripod beneath the waves and sand to get a new perspective.

“No place I’ve ever been had clouds and colors in the sky like the Vineyard,” says Zide, now an instructor at Hallmark Institute of Photography
in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, where he recently compiled a book of his seminal Vineyard shots.

As tricky as it is for photographers such as Zide to shoot those often-fleeting skies, it’s perhaps even more challenging for a landscape painter like Allen Whiting to capture the Island’s elusive moods. Whiting describes his work as dancing with the light. “It’s a live performance,” he says. “My world is a stage set with someone else doing the lighting. Nature plays with light and gives you gifts. A bush is different at 6:30 versus eleven in the morning. It’s different on     an overcast day than when the sun breaks out. The things themselves seem to change, but they don’t. It’s the light.”

As he goes about his chores on his family’s West Tisbury sheep farm or runs errands around the Island, Whiting asks himself all day, every single day: “Is this a painting?” “Is this a painting?” At dinnertime, he may bring in an armload of wood, look over his shoulder, and see a streak of red on the horizon. He will tell himself that tomorrow evening he must be sure and catch that light. But then tomorrow it’s gone. “You’re never off the clock,” he says, “and that creates a bit of estrangement from the world. But because you love it and are a student of the changing light, that opens the door for how you look at the geometry and feel and color and mystery of a place.”

When Whiting was younger, he was often drawn to the romance of dramatic red sunsets and black branches, of bright blue skies and big clouds. Now he finds the more subtle effects of midday landscapes just as worthy as subjects. Perhaps the rain has just stopped and the light is unstable. The sky’s steel gray. Or perhaps the sky is bleached and boink! a magic wand of light colors a bush such an electric green that it’s too surreal to be believed. Perhaps five sheep graze in an olive green field beneath a distant dark hillside, then a strip of yellow sparks the horizon. “When you’ve done this long enough you’re looking for that little streak of light,” he says. “I go out hoping the light will avail itself to me.”

Often Whiting sets up his easel in the field with his friend and fellow landscape painter Bill McLane. They go when McLane’s kids are in school. They’ll generally paint for a couple of hours, until they find the light is chasing shadows. The next day they’ll come back a half-hour before they finished the day before, so they can pick up where they left off. It’ll take five, six, or seven visits to complete a large canvas. In that process, a weather system may shift
the quality of light, changing everything. The canvas gets set aside.

If Whiting is painting by the light of a full moon in August and doesn’t finish in time, he’ll have to wait a month till the next full moon. By then the moon has shifted in the sky and the light is ghosting another stretch of canvas. To hold the light still is an elusive quest.

Both Whiting and McLane have decades of experience between them. They know their medium well. They talk about light all the time (when they’re not discussing women). I ask Whiting to explain the language of light that he and McLane share in the field. “It’s mostly astonishment,” he says. When the light intensifies the landscape, Whiting will say, “Would you look at that! Can you get that, Bill?’ ” McLane will answer, “No.” The technical term used by master painters to describe the interplay of tonal variations, therefore, is: wow!

The Vineyard light, of course, belongs not just to those whose “job” or passion it is to capture and express it, but to everyone. It’s ours for the viewing. As with birders, it’s a matter of training our eye to catch the quick flicker through the trees. It’s learning to see, see deeper, then re-see all the same stuff. “People on the mainland might go from one town to the next, shooting the light on subject matter in the same way in different places,” says photographer Alison Shaw. “But when you live on an island nine by twenty-one miles in size, you have nowhere else to go.” So this learning to see the nuance of light, this looking deeper, reverses things: instead of changing the landscape you look at, you learn to see the light changing it.

When Shaw plans to shoot wildflowers at Marina’s Field in Chilmark, one of her favorite high-summer spots, she knows not to go too early, because the warm yellow of dawn light will muddy the trueness of the greens. In general, most colors pop when the light is flat in overcast conditions. “Finding the correct light for the subject matter totally transforms a photo from being just a pretty snapshot into being an amazing art shot,” says Shaw, who reminds me that the word “photography” comes from the Greek and means “writing with light.”

“You can have the same composition, the same everything, but it all comes down to capturing that light.”

At one of Shaw’s photography shows, a woman wanted to know what filters and what darkroom tricks Shaw had used to make the color so stunning. “The only trick,” says Shaw, “was seeing it in the first place.” The woman was skeptical. Shaw told her at about two o’clock on a bright, sunny day, she should go to the Edgartown wharf and closely observe the reflection of the fishing boats in the water along the dock. At Shaw’s next show, the woman returned and excitedly told her, “I saw it. I saw what you were talking about.”  

Another thing Shaw talks about when it comes to light is looking the opposite way. Instead of shooting a sky full of Ocean Park fireworks or Menemsha Beach sunset, turn and shoot the warm golden glow bathing peoples’ faces. It says a lot about what makes the Vineyard light special: looking for and capturing what it falls on.  

Shaw takes her students to shoot sunsets on Lucy Vincent Beach because the sun there sets somewhat behind you. “That’s the best beach for forcing you to look off from the sunset and see a more subtle aspect of the light,” she says. “It makes you separate yourself from the reds and oranges and yellows and see the pinks and purples, pale blues, and pale grays that are way more interesting.”

Over the years, shots of red and gold Island sunsets have become such a popular postcard icon that Shaw finds it more difficult to get an artistic gallery print worth keeping. Like Whiting, she has moved through her sunset phase. She may look out her window, see a gorgeous sunset on the way, and decide to let it pass. She still appreciates the razzle-dazzle of Vineyard evening skies, but after decades of chasing light, she’s learned to pick her spots.

She has been known to change lenses while driving speedily down dirt roads – not something she recommends – as she races to catch clouds skyrocketing over an electric blue south shore (a shot that former President Bill Clinton now owns). She has jumped from bed at dawn, running out in her pajamas to catch a gold-edged herd of dark clouds gathering over Farm Pond Channel that disappeared soon after she shot it.

She could go to the Lagoon hundreds of times and not get the right shot, but she has learned to anticipate how temperature and humidity will conspire to create the perfect light. “In the fall, when the forecast is for a frosty night and the winds drop to five miles an hour,” she says, “there’s likely to be a mist on the Lagoon in the morning when the water is flat and calm. The mist will sit between the shores, billowing as high as the treetops until the sun climbs up to burn it off.”

Autumn offers lots of magical brews of light like that. That’s why fall light is the favorite (with spring a close second) for most Islanders I talked to. “In the summer there’s more salt in the air; it’s like boiling water with lots of steam,” says Dick Johnson, executive director of Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation. “Then suddenly it’s September, and you can see forever. I live on the west end of the Island, and at that time of year, the light is so clear it looks like you could throw a stone across to the Elizabeth Islands – that you could reach out and touch them in the morning and evening light, though they are miles away.”

Johnson, like most Vineyarders I talked to about light, believes that Islanders are more attuned to the seasonal shifts, because it affects them more than those who live in the city. “After the sad November light,” says Johnson, “and after all the grays and browns of winter, all the light seems to come back at once in spring. Our brains change with the increase of light and we notice the white light of the shadbush blossoms as the cycle coming around to reward us. I love to ride the roads through the woods and see the shrubs manifest themselves in a cloud of white.”

As a biologist, Johnson particularly notices how the light falls on living creatures like the scarlet tanager, pulsing red as neon. He loves to go out on the
Cedar Tree Woods Trail. “In the spring, especially after all the rain, light is so alive,” he says. “The moss is so green, it looks lit from within. There’s a kind of greenish golden haze in the fields and woods. The green seems to the eye as if it’s in the air all around you. You can see why the people of Ireland love their land. It’s like little spots of Ireland all over the Island.”

More so than painters and biologists, sailors are concerned with the practicality of light. As one of the select mariners licensed to captain any ship of any size on any ocean in the world, Fred Murphy of Lambert’s Cove has looked at plenty of shorelines with lots more ambient light and smoggier skies than the Vineyard. In fact, when I caught up with Murphy by cell phone, he was captaining a merchant marine ship off the West Coast. How did the Vineyard compare to other places he’s sailed? “The Vineyard light is a cleaner, crisper, more definitive light,” he says. “The light in other places, like out here in California, is much more mottled by stuff in the air.”

His favorite light to sail in happens at night.

“The nights are really pretty out on the water,” says Murphy. “Most people go to bed and miss it all. There’s nothing like having a bottle of wine and checking out the night skies.” He says he would rank the Vineyard right up there as one of the best places in the world for star-watching. “People always say they like to be at sea,” he says, “but after a long time out, it’s nice to see some light onshore and have a destination in the harbor to come home to.”