Category: Field Notes

Eilean Donan. From Highlands, Isle, and Ancient Stone.

October 10, 2026

You have probably seen this shape before, even if nobody ever told you its name. A low island, a stone tower, hills behind it with snow still sitting on them.

Three sea lochs meet at that island. What stands there now spent the best part of two hundred years as a ruin, and the only reason it is whole again is that one man decided to put it back.

Twenty years to put it back

In 1911 Lieutenant Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap bought the island. He gave most of the next twenty years to rebuilding the castle on it, working with his clerk of works, Farquar Macrae, and the architect George Mackie Watson.

They did not invent a castle. They followed the ground plan of the earlier building, which had survived in the stonework, and built up from that. Tower, rampart, walls, the well inside. The work was formally finished in July 1932.

Twenty years on one building, on a small island, in Highland weather. Most people would have fenced it off and left it a ruin. He hauled stone instead. What you recognise on a postcard now is his patience as much as it is anyone’s masonry.

How it was made

March 2023. Thirty three millimeters, f/8, 1/500 second, ISO 100, and the exposure pulled down a full stop.

Those numbers tell you there was plenty of light. A shutter that fast, at f/8, with the sensor at its least sensitive setting, means a bright day and nothing fought for.

The stop of negative compensation is the snow and the sky. They are the first things to go, and once they are gone there is nothing left in the file to bring back. So you give up a little brightness everywhere to keep the white on those hills as white with texture in it.

f/8 is also about where a lens like that is sharpest, and that matters in a frame built this way. The castle sits in the middle distance. The hills sit a long way behind it. Both have to hold.

Light therapy and healing

Radiation aimed at the head and neck is hard on the lining of the mouth. For plenty of people the sores are the part of treatment they remember afterward, because they are the part that makes eating difficult.

There is a light for that. Photobiomodulation means shining a low power red or near infrared light inside the mouth across the weeks of treatment. It is not a hot light and it is not a laser cutting anything.

An international panel of specialists, MASCC and ISOO, recommends it to prevent those sores in adults having radiation to the head and neck, and again in adults having radiation alongside chemotherapy. In March 2026 a review in Supportive Care in Cancer pooled thirty randomised trials and 1,748 patients. Severe sores came out at a risk ratio of 0.46, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.29 to 0.71. Severe mouth pain came out at 0.35.

Those authors call it promising and say the certainty of the evidence is still low. Photon radiation sits close to my own work, so a light that makes those weeks easier to get through is the kind of finding I read twice.

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FROM THE COLLECTION

Highlands, Isle, and Ancient Stone runs from Edinburgh through Pitlochry and Portree and out to the cliffs of Skye. Seventeen pictures. This is one of them.

If you look after a room where people sit and wait, tell me about the room. How long they stay, what the light does in there, what they look at now. I will tell you straight whether anything in this collection belongs on that wall.

Richard

Sources

Eilean Donan, History and About.
Highland Historic Environment Record, Eilean Donan Castle, MHG45372.
Zadik and others, Systematic review of photobiomodulation for the management of oral mucositis in cancer patients and clinical practice guidelines, Supportive Care in Cancer, 2019, the MASCC and ISOO guidelines.
Pedroso and others, Effects of photobiomodulation on oral mucositis, oral pain, xerostomia, salivary flow rate, and quality of life in patients with head and neck cancer, a systematic review and meta-analysis, Supportive Care in Cancer, 2026.

Golden Gate, Wildflower Season. From Cypress, Stone, and Sea.

September 28, 2026

You have seen this bridge a thousand times. Postcards, film posters, the lock screen on somebody’s phone. That is the trouble with a famous view. Your eye recognizes it and moves on before it ever really looks.

This one has lupine in it. A whole slope of it, in bloom. The flowers are what slow you down, and the bridge is just what happens to be standing behind them.

Nobody planned that color

Construction started on January 5, 1933. The steel showed up wearing a coat of red lead primer, the dull orange you put on metal to keep it from rusting before the real paint goes on. Irving Morrow, the consulting architect, passed it on his way to the site and could not stop looking at it.

So he ran color studies. He ruled out black, which he wrote would be unattractive and would shrink the bridge more than any other color. He ruled out aluminum, which would leave the towers without substance and make them look tiny. Warm grey finished second. Orange won because it blended with the hills behind it and stood apart from the ocean and the sky.

The bridge opened to people on foot on May 27, 1937, and to cars the next day at noon, when Franklin Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House. The main span runs 4,200 feet. The towers stand 746 feet above the water.

How it was made

Late March, 2022. Twenty eight millimeters, f/8, 1/320 second, ISO 100, no exposure compensation at all.

Those numbers tell you the light. A shutter that fast, at f/8, with the sensor at its least sensitive setting, means there was a great deal of it. Open coastal light. Nothing rescued afterward.

f/8 is also where a lens like that is at its sharpest, and sharpness is the whole game in a frame built this way. The flowers sit close to the camera. The bridge sits far off. You want both of them to hold.

A lamp instead of a knife

Light does more in medicine than let us see. On September 14 the FDA approved a gel called Ameluz, used together with a red light lamp, for superficial basal cell carcinoma in adults. You spread the gel on the lesion and wait. The fastest dividing cells take it up and turn it into a compound that reacts to red light. Then the lamp goes on, and the light does the work.

The trial behind the approval put 187 adults through it, and nobody knew who had the real gel and who had a placebo one. Twelve weeks later, 66 percent of the people treated with Ameluz and the lamp were clear on both the clinical check and the tissue check. In the placebo group it was 5 percent. On the tissue check alone, 76 percent against 19.

This is the first photodynamic therapy the FDA has approved for any skin cancer. It covers the superficial kind that sits on the surface, not the deeper tumors and not melanoma, so the scalpel is not going anywhere. But if you have a handful of lesions on the face you meet in the mirror every morning, a lamp instead of a knife is not a small thing.

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FROM THE COLLECTION

Cypress, Stone, and Sea follows the coast from San Francisco through Monterey and Pebble Beach and down into Big Sur. Fourteen pictures. This is one of them.

If you look after a room where people sit and wait, write back and tell me what the room is like. What the light does in it, how long people stay, what they stare at now. I will tell you honestly whether anything here belongs on that wall.

Richard

Sources

Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Color and Art Deco Styling, Key Dates in Bridge History and Design and Construction Stats.
Biofrontera, FDA Approval of Ameluz Red Light PDT for the Treatment of Superficial Basal Cell Carcinoma, 14 September 2026, with independent reporting in Dermatology Times and HCPLive.

Moon over Yaquina Head at blue hour, the lamp already turning.

Yaquina Head, Oregon · December 2025

The place

There is a moment on the Oregon coast when the sun is gone and the sky has not decided what to do yet. The sea goes flat and silver. Then a light comes on at the end of the headland and begins its slow turn, and you realise you have been waiting for it.

That light has come on every night since August 20, 1873. Fayette Crosby, the first keeper, lit a four wick lamp burning lard oil, and the beam went out over the water for the first time. The tower stands 93 feet, the tallest on the Oregon coast. Inside it is a first order Fresnel lens, built in Paris in 1868 by Barbier and Fenestre, shipped from France and unpacked at the head in October 1872, ten months before anyone lit it. It is still up there. The same glass has been bending the same beam for more than 150 years.

The keepers left in 1966 when the light was automated. The lamp behind the lens has changed many times. Lard oil, then kerosene, then electricity in 1933. On December 2, 2018 the halogen bulb gave way to a stack of 36 LEDs, and Yaquina Head became the second lighthouse in the country to make that change and the first on the West Coast. New light, old lens. The pattern is unchanged. Two seconds on, two off, two on, fourteen off, all night, every night.

How it was made

Early December 2025. One frame at 28 mm, f/2.8, 1/60 of a second, ISO 200, held back by two thirds of a stop so the sky would not wash out.

Those numbers say the light was nearly gone. The aperture wide open, a slow shutter, and the sensor still needed a push. Blue hour, in other words. The sun was down, the sky still held a little colour, and the moon was already up, which is why the picture exists at all. A few minutes either way and it is a different photograph.

Light as an instrument

Something I keep noticing. The thing that makes a lighthouse work, bright light at the right hour, is being tested as a treatment.

In February 2026 a research team published a randomized controlled trial in Frontiers in Psychiatry. Forty eight inpatients with depression were split into two groups. One sat in front of a 10,000 lux lamp for thirty minutes between nine and ten each morning for fourteen days. The other got 100 lux, a dim light that looks like a treatment but is not. At the end, the bright light group had lower fasting blood glucose and a lower daily average of cortisol, the stress hormone, than the dim light group.

It was one hospital and two weeks, so hold it lightly. But it fits a pattern that keeps turning up. Light at the right hour reaches further into the body than the eyes. The keepers at Yaquina Head knew the first half of that by heart. They lit the lamp at dusk for more than ninety years.

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Richard Abraham, MD
Healing Light Media

Sources

Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Oregon Encyclopedia. History of Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Bureau of Land Management. A new LED lamp and the evolution of Yaquina Head light sources, Friends of Yaquina Lighthouses. Fang J and others, The effect of bright light therapy on glycemic control and cortisol rhythmicity in depression, a randomized controlled trial, Frontiers in Psychiatry, February 11, 2026.

Tunnel View stripped to tone, storm cloud filling the upper frame.

Yosemite Valley, California · March 2025

The place

If you have seen Yosemite Valley in a photograph, there is a fair chance the photographer was standing at the mouth of a road tunnel. The Wawona Tunnel — 4,233 feet bored through granite — opened on June 10, 1933, after nearly two years of work and about $850,000, replacing a steep, narrow stage road with something an automobile could manage. The overlook sits just past its eastern portal and took the tunnel’s name. From it you see the southwest face of El Capitan on the left, Half Dome on the axis, and Bridalveil Fall on the right.

The valley was protected long before the road arrived. On June 30, 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the bill granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California, on the condition that they be held, in the language of the act, for public use, resort, and recreation.

How it was made

Early March, 2025, after the sun had left the valley. The frame is one exposure: ninety-three seconds at f/4.5, ISO 100, 52mm, on a tripod.

At that length there is no hand-holding and no hurrying. The shutter stays open while the storm cloud moves and the granite does not, so the moving thing records as smoothed tone and the still thing stays hard-edged. Rendered in monochrome, the picture keeps what that light actually offered — weight, edge, gradient — and nothing it did not.

Light as an instrument

Something I keep circling back to: surgeons are increasingly operating by light.

Fluorescence-guided surgery gives a patient a dye that concentrates in particular tissue, then illuminates the surgical field so that tissue announces itself while the operation is under way. Indocyanine green has been approved since 1959 and in routine surgical use since roughly 2005. Pafolacianine, which binds the folate receptor, was approved by the FDA in November 2021 to help identify ovarian cancer lesions, and expanded in December 2022 to lung lesions.

In May the American College of Surgeons reported that the technique is moving past cancer — toward nerve visualization, burn assessment, perfusion in flaps and transplants, and confirming blood supply at a bowel anastomosis. An early-phase study of a nerve-highlighting agent in 38 men undergoing robotic prostatectomy reported workable dosing with few adverse events. These are findings reported by their investigators, not settled practice.

Still, the instinct is a familiar one. Point light carefully at a thing and it will show you its actual edges. It is more or less why I stand in the cold with a tripod at the end of the day.

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Richard Abraham, MD
Healing Light Media

Sources

Wawona Tunnel and Tunnel View, Wikipedia and Wikipedia. Opening date, cost and construction: Sierra Sun Times. Yosemite Grant of June 30, 1864: Library of Congress. Pafolacianine approval: U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Fluorescence-guided surgery beyond oncology: American College of Surgeons Bulletin, May 2026.

I am a physician. Light is the instrument of my working life—we diagnose by it every day, and often we treat with it. Healing Light is an extension of that same purpose: light, turned toward the rooms where people wait, recover, endure, and heal.

Every photograph in these collections was made with those rooms in mind—the wall a patient faces, the corridor a family walks, the window a space doesn’t have.

What this Journal is

Each entry begins with one photograph—where it was made, what the light was doing, and why that place holds still in the mind. Alongside it, something from the other half of the work: what is being learned about light and the people who heal in it.

One place, one photograph, and what the light is still teaching us.