Journal

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.

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.

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.