Last December, I completed by responsibilities at the college a bit earlier than usual and took off like a shot for the Pacific Northwest. I had been looking for ideas the week before and when I finally saw that waves approaching 25 feet were due to hit the Central Oregon Coast, I made a quick reservation at an Airbnb in Coos Bay and set off on the 16 hour drive to Medford. I spent the night at a truck stop before heading over to Brookings and then up the coast. I spent the next 8 days shooting my butt off.
After shooting some colossal waves, I decided to continue North up to Cape Disappointment in Washington with hopes of grabbing more large waves as high winds were in the forecast. I arrived early on this particular morning fairly certain that I was going to get skunked. I spent about 30 minutes or so shooting long exposures in the dim morning twilight before some color began to creep into the sky. The mist that you see in this shot was not from low clouds but instead from spray left when the waves in this area slammed into the cliff face. I also waited long enough to allow the beam of the light house to sweep across during this exposure.
Shortly after this photo was taken, the entire sky erupted over Cape Disappointment. This is easily one of my favorite spots on the Washington Coast, and I'm hoping to get back here next week on a short break before my Spring semester begins.
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Tags: Cape Disappointment Washington Pacific Coast Sunrise
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Roughly about 20 minutes after the prior photo was taken the sky lit up in all directions at once. In my earlier shot, you can see a bit of color beginning to creep into the sky. I had actually made a trip out to the same spot the night before and was disappointed with the light went off directly behind me and then promptly died. And if you have been following me on flickr for any length of time, you have probably seen me bemoan the fact that my batting average for good light is horrendously low. Several times on this trip last December I set off at 4:30 AM and drove over 2 hours just to find that the promise of high clouds had evaporated, or that the gap to the East had disappeared leaving a wall of unbroken gray.
But every so often...you wake up and it's raining, and Skyfire says you only have a 50% shot of a sunrise, and you're thinking it's more like zero because...well...it's raining...but you head out anyway. And you get out of the car and you're freezing, and you're tired and your fingers aren't working and there's too many clouds and you know in your gut that you're going to get skunked again....and despite the odds, a wisp of pink appears... and then another....and then everything explodes. THOSE are the mornings that keep you coming back.
And so I shall. Thursday morning at 5 AM I'll be trying to beat the rush hour traffic up the 5 and out towards the grapevine...and then another 12 hour drive across the Oregon border for another week of shooting along that amazing coastline.
As for this particular shot, I think it has a bit too much sky in it....but I just couldn't bring myself to crop out any more. We just don't get skies like this where I come from. I remember hearing a podcast not too long ago where Alex Noriega announced that he is done with sunsets and sunrises. They hold no interest for him. I remember thinking...that must be nice. To be so inundated with skies that you don't jump up and down anymore when the light goes off. As for me...I live here in Southern California in an unbroken cesspool of brown weeds, power lines, and pavement. We see MAYBE one sky like this a year. We can go months without seeing a cloud. So when the sky lights up along the coast of Oregon and Washington, I have to remind myself to keep shooting because I'm generally standing there with my mouth hanging open. We are STARVED for skies like this in my neighborhood, but I imagine this sort of thing might become rather routine for photographers in the Pacific Northwest.
I doubt if it will ever become routine for me.
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Tags: Cape Disappointment Sunrise Washington Pacific Coast
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Hopefully all of you are hanging in there during this challenging and difficult time. So much has happened since my last post. I made another trip up the coast during my Spring/Winter break at the end of February and drove right through virus country when it was taking off and then went right back to teaching after arriving home. A week later I traveled to a convention in Salt Lake and when I returned, I may or may not have had COVID-19. I had all the symptoms and dutifully contacted Kaiser about the possibility of getting a test but was turned down, presumably because they didn't have enough tests in the early days of the pandemic. Not to be deterred, I headed in for a flu test so I could rule out the virus, but the flu test came back negative. And they STILL wouldn't give me a COVID-19 test. So....after two weeks of coughing and a fever that kept coming back...I'm symptom free. Whatever I had is now gone. :)
Along with almost all of my classes. :( My online classes are still going strong, but my on campus ensembles were all cancelled for the semester...which now has given me quite a bit of extra time. What to do? Well...I guess it's time to start digging through the thousands of shots that I haven't had time to get to for the past 8 months or so.
So I thought I should probably start with a shot that represents the reason I dropped everything and made the 2000 mile round trip to the Oregon Coast last December. I had seen a couple of other shots from Shore Acres toward the end of November and I promised myself if I ever had the opportunity to head up there with the right conditions, I would jump on it. After checking the forecast and seeing a high surf warning with high winds and waves approaching 25 feet, I was in the Prius and heading North the next day.
After spending most of the day shooting facing North with a hardy crowd of photographers who didn't seem to mind the gale or the rain, I began to wonder what this section of beach looked like from the opposite direction. Either way you look at it, this particular section of the Oregon Coast is simply awe inspiring if you show up on a day with a high tide and a high surf warning. From what I have seen, the coastal rocks in this area must form some sort of ramp and as large waves approach and crash, they are launched dozens of feet into the air....possibly over 100 feet at times. It's like the fourth of July with 20,000 cubic feet of water.
Granted this isn't the cleanest photo I've ever taken as the air was full of mist and it was still raining off and on while I was shooting, but it's one of the larger explosions that I witnessed over the two days I shot there. If you look closely, you might be able to see the ant sized people standing just to the left of this massive wave.
Later that week I made the trip up to Cape Disappointment before turning around and heading home. I was hoping for similar conditions on my February trip, but unfortunately, the sun came out for several days which must have been awesome for the folks who live up there....but not as much for wave junkies like me.
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Tags: Shore Acres Oregon Pacific Northwest Waves Storm
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So....here's how it should work: There should be a formula along the lines of...
Miles driven + lack of sleep + damage to car x beautiful location = incredible landscape photograph.
In reality...You can go days...and sometimes weeks.... no...MONTHS without getting the light you are hoping for. And no matter how hard you try....you might end up shooting dead, cloudless, hazy skies, or in my case, non-stop fog and low clouds.
Take, for example, my three trips down a sketchy logging road at the North end of Vancouver Island last July. I was determined to get a shot of San Josef Harbor and I figured I would either get a nice sunset shot or a Milky Way shot...as long as I kept an eye on the weather and made multiple attempts. Over those three days, I made numerous trips up and down that trail to the beach, woke up at 2 AM twice, shredded the tires on my Prius, drove back to Campbell river to get some signal, down the sketchy road to nowhere courtesy of Google maps, dodged multiple logging trucks going 70 in the pre dawn light...and nothing. I got some nice shots of the forest, but I got absolutely shut out by the weather.
So now it's the middle of the week and I'm in an airbnb in Nanaimo...right on the harbor, and I wake up late and I stare at the ceiling....and I wonder for a minute why everything is orange. And then it hits me. I jump out of bed, glance out the window, and see that the Harbor has gone nuclear. 30 seconds later, I'm downstairs with jeans on over my PJs shooting like a wild man. I break my BUTT trying to get a decent shot of San Josef for three days with almost no sleep, and I get THIS shot from simply rolling out of bed and running downstairs.
I've known this for awhile now, but that week really brought it home to me: Landscape photography is NOT fair. You don't get any points for effort. It doesn't matter how hard you try or how many miles you drive. If the light isn't there, it isn't there.
But when you decide to sleep in, the light goes off right behind you and you get a shot literally 40 steps from your room. What the...???
All of that aside...This is a shot of Nanaimo Harbor taken just outside the small hotel I was staying at. After grabbing this, I spent at least an hour running around the harbor grabbing shots before the light changed and the glassy surface disappeared as the sea planes began to take off on their morning runs. Nanaimo was a beautiful town and I will definitely be making a return visit.
I hope to get more shots up from my visit to Vancouver Island soon. I went up with some specific shots in mind as I am a big fan of both Adam Gibbs and Gavin Hardcastle, but I soon discovered that Vancouver Island is a pretty big place and I just scratched the surface during my crazy week of shooting there.
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Tags: Nanaimo Vancouver Island Sunrise
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Just finished a big week of concerts and spent yesterday racing from a sunrise in Laguna Beach out to Death Valley for a sunset attempt. I was tempted to get right into processing those shots, but I thought I would pause and take a look back first at my ever growing backlog of photos. I still have quite a pile from my trip up to the Columbia River Gorge from last May, and Spirit Falls was definitely one of the big highlights of the trip. A big shoutout again to Ryan Engstrom without whom we would have never found this particular set of Falls. To this day, I have no clear idea where these falls were located other than they were on the Washington side of the gorge. We were racing against the clock as our daylight was disappearing fast and suddenly Ryan yelled for us to pull over at a non descript pullout. From where we pulled over, we could hear no sound of running water, and off to the side of the road there was simply a jumble of boulders and scraggly looking trees. We all thought Ryan had lost it at that point. But trusting Ryan, (who had been pretty reliable so far), the four of us plunged over the ravine, and the spot Ryan led us to was easily one of the most gorgeous locations I've ever seen.
Our time shooting down there was very short, but I definitely want to return there soon. I just hope I can find it again on my next visit.
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Tags: Columbia River Gorge Spirit Falls Columbia River Washington Rokinon 12mm 2.8 Fisheye
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