Lighthouses can be so hard to find that planning a trip to photograph them takes three months, says Ray Elliott '72. Many lighthouses are in remote, inhospitable places. Some sit in harbors; others, on islands or rocks. Minot's Ledge, for example, is built on an underwater ledge off the Massachusetts coast. "People think I just get into my car and go photograph lighthouses. But it's really a job," he says.

Shrouded in tales of heroic keepers, held up as symbols of strength and stability, lighthouses are so compelling to Elliott that he has made a second career of photographing them all over the world. A charter boat operator once summed up their magic for him: "He said they always show him the way home. They're always right where they should be." Elliott has taken 10 long trips of 45 to 65 days each, in pursuit of his goal to photograph 600 lighthouses. So far, he has driven 150,000 miles and taken 100,000 photos of 487 lighthouses.

Elliott's favorite is Nubble Light in York, Maine, because he went there a lot as a kid. He finds Peggy's Point in Nova Scotia the most photogenic. The hardest to reach is Punta Gorda on California's "Lost Coast," which requires a harrowing 20-mile drive plus a three-and-a-half mile hike over soft sand each way. "You've got to really want to photograph it," he says.

Elliott has a business, Mister Lighthouse, Inc., based in Crystal Lake, Ill., which markets his lighthouse photos. BrownTrout Publishing has published a 2008 calendar of his lighthouse pictures. For his upcoming book, Classic Lighthouses of New England, Elliott interviewed 103-year-old Connie Small, who lived with her husband in several Maine and New Hampshire lighthouses. He also talked to Wanton Chase, who was raised by his grandparents at Rose Island Light in Newport (R.I.) Harbor because he was sickly. "When he returned on a fishing trip 60 years later," says Elliott, "he could smell his grandmother's sugar cookies in the lighthouse kitchen."

There's no end to lighthouse stories, Elliott says. Take Ida Lewis. She helped her mother tend Lime Rock Light in Rhode Island after her father had a stroke, and then in 1879 became the first formally appointed female U.S. lighthouse keeper. Credited with saving at least 18 lives, Lewis won a Congressional medal after pulling two soldiers from an ice floe. She even saved drowning animals. By the time President Ulysses S. Grant visited her, she had become a national heroine.

In the United States, only Boston Harbor Light is still manned, and only part time. But many lighthouses are said to be haunted by the ghosts of their former keepers, their children or even their pets. Docents bringing tourists to Seul Choix Lighthouse in Michigan reported smelling the keeper's cigar smoke after his death and finding the dishes switched around.

Recently Elliott has started photographing interiors as well, "so people who never get to see the inside of lighthouses can see what they look like."