2024 Oregon Coast Trip Report
I know I’m not alone. C’mon, tell the truth, how many of you have hard drives filled with images from trips, not culled, unedited, and the next trip is already booked? I’ll raise my hand. Guilty as charged. But as I desperately try to wrangle my storage and organization of my digital image archive, I feel like writing “trip report” blog posts may just help me to look at recent images and pick out some immediate ones to share. They may not be my “A game” images. Heck, they may even be my B and C images, but the process of actually looking at recent images, fresh with the excitement and emotion behind them may just be something that sticks. The plan is to share some thoughts on creating them, both from the artistic and technical aspects.
Last month, I spent the longest continuous stretch of days along the Oregon coast since moving to Washington in 2015 with most trips lasting 2-6 days. But when a private guided tour for a week transitioned into a group workshop, I found myself starting at Cannon Beach in the north, traveling south to Bandon then ending in Yachats. Plenty of fish and chips were consumed and I think I found my new favorite place to indulge in the decadent fried goodness. More on that later. But to start off, this is one of the last images of the trip. Thor’s Well. My group workshop got to experience a variety of conditions. We had clear skies, overcast gray gloom, and absolute top notch light during one memorable sunrise of “epic proportions”. But we hadn’t really experienced what the Oregon coast is good at: storms with big surf and rain. On our final sunset, a storm did indeed roll in, there were drops of rain, but the mood was undeniable. Lined up with one of my clients, Corey, at the end of the evening, we both captured the sunset’s transition into twilight. While earlier, the sun broke through for some golden goodness, the subdued hues of post sunset just seemed to fit the mood. The wind was fierce, a challenge for slow shutter speeds. Rapid firing a continuous burst can often help, if for no other reason than relying on the law of averages. Some of these shots MUST be sharp! Well, not too many were. Still, one heck of an adrenaline rush as Thor’s Well pumped and drained. I always plan my workshops so the tide at either sunrise or sunset works at this location. Adding a big storm had me doubting the risks, but we hit the incoming edge. Surf was even higher the next morning.
I will often suggest seeking out transition zones on the coast. Anywhere water is interacting with something else can be a great place to find interesting patterns and textures. And on previous evening at Seal Rock State Park, a few of us spent time exploring the outflow of a small creek as it made its way to the ocean. Water wove its way down slabs of rock and sheets of sand. Dan, one of my clients, was working a low angle scene of water colliding with a rock which was splashing upwards. I had been showing how the ripple patterns across the golden rock created nice lines. I noticed the splash patterns on Dan’s rock radiated upwards in an interesting. Shooting straight down provided the angle. Experimenting with shutter speeds to capture the splash pattern kept us engaged much longer than I ever thought possible for such a simple scene. Pushing the ISO to 800 allowed for a 1/125sec which helped capture the patterns.
Rewind to midway through my private tour, I took a gamble on a location for sunrise with easy access (more sleep for me) and a good south facing view. Sunrises on the coast can be tricky if you are after a potential “good sky with light”. Finding south facing beaches can help. This view was new to me and I incorporated some of the golden grass for added texture since the 90 second exposure would smooth the textures in the water and sky. I often emphasize on how having contrasting textures can strengthen an image.
The following three images share something in common beyond being golden. They represent the very important idea of slowing down and stopping to create images, even if the intent was something else. For the first image, sunrise with the group had wrapped up, but I drew attention to the offshore wind and how it was “rooster tailing” the tops of the waves. And if the sun was uninterrupted by clouds or land, we could get some great light. It all came together and while coffee and breakfast were on everyone’s mind (including my own), the morning shoot extended for another 20-30 minutes as we shot the glowing spray of the waves. The second photograph was spent wandering the beach aimlessly, looking for anything and everything when I stumbled across this twisted ball of kelp. I was instantly drawn to the challenge of how to compose it. Let me know what you think. It’s still a bit chaotic, but I am happy with the result overall. The final image is from Seal Rock up top just past the parking lot and foot path to the beach. The low angle sun was peaking through the trees and I just could not let the opportunity pass me up. If you see something you like, photograph it!
Shore Acres is known for being one of the premiere destinations along the Oregon Coast for observing big waves crash into the bluffs. The images are absolutely amazing. However, I have never been in the are during a storm and since it’s about a 6-7 hour drive, I haven’t committed to getting there during high surf. I’m sure that will change eventually. But…Shore Acres has a botanical garden. Shore Acres has forest. And most importantly, Shore Acres has sandstone, or better yet, tafoni! What is tafoni you ask? It’s a type of cavernous weathering. Basically, physical and chemical elements form this insanely cool looking rock. I grew up near pockets of tafoni along the coast in Santa Cruz. There are regions in the northern California coast that has some. I even came across some in southern New Zealand. But it wasn’t until this trip that I explored them at Shore Acres. And I am glad I did. They offer endless opportunities for crafting compositions. They help me flex my brain juices. The delicate, almost skeletal, features offer a world worth immersing yourself into. Go late afternoon for best light. Even better, since the parking lot closes at sunset, leave your car outside the park’s gated lot and do the short walk in via one of the trails and stay for the afterglow on a clear evening.
The unequivocal top destination for sea stacks along the Oregon coast is at Bandon. For classic seascapes, there is no better location. I came back with several images from the south end of the beach, each with a different story to tell. While Bandon has an official Wizard’s Hat rock, the following images are not of it. There are, in fact, several pointy tipped, hat resembling rocks here. This is the official one, and yes, I waited all morning for that rainbow to appear!
But the pointy rock that became the focal point for a few compositions was this one. To set the scene, this was the second to last morning with my private client. We got to the beach and the color was starting to creep in, but only to the south. A misty haze clung to the air, especially over the ocean. Once the sun came up, the haze diminished, or at least the more direct light cut through it better. Turning my attention to this arrangement of rocks, one I had photographed a few times prior to this trip, the early morning sunlight kissed the tops of the sea stacks. I used a 3 stop ND filter on the back of my Sony 12-24mm lens to allow me to use one of my preferred shutter speeds of 1/2 sec.
Fast forward a few days, and my group workshop was out to dinner. We discussed the idea of night photography but everyone seemed content with the day, including myself. But the recent comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) had been in the news. Of course, I had seen images. I even had intentions of going out in Seattle only for the clouds to throw that plan out the window. Two days later, I was on the Oregon coast for my trip. But the skies were clear and the levels of FOMO were rising. I got back to the hotel, pointed my camera at the sky and took a test shot. How clear was it? It was. Yup, I had to go. One of my clients, Andrea, joined me after all and we had the beach to ourselves. I knew exactly where we needed to go. After some test shots from the bluff, we headed to the (not) Wizard’s Hat rock.
I edited this the next morning with a technique I hadn’t tried before. Being a new Mac user, I had to get Starry Landscape Stacker (Sequator is the Windows version). I loaded up my star images (I took 10-15) to get a cleaner sky image. I had also taken some longer exposures at ISO 1600 and f5.6 to get better depth and detail on the land. I stacked those to get better detail on the land. A quick sky replacement from those two did the trick. The finishing touches, done just yesterday, were to get a more realistic reflection of the sky. The land images I took at ISO 1600 and 4 minutes had longer, fainter star trails in them. I wanted the static stars in the reflection. This proved to be a chore, and I hate image editing to be a chore, so where it stands now will likely be how it ends up on my website and social media.
Finally, I mentioned that sunrise of “epic proportions”. The morning after capturing the comet and milky way, the sky was glowing intensely as the group arrived at the parking lot. We hustled down to the beach and the color only intensified. At one point we had 270 degree, wrap around light. The image below is the cell phone panorama. The following image is one I managed to grab as I bounced between clients, making sure to include the (non) hat rock.
This last image is one I have been meaning to try every time I pass by these pilings. But yet, after many visits to Bandon, I had never carved out the time and allowed myself to explore it creatively. During an overcast day during a midday break, I ventured out to see what I could find. In 2010, I made an image of old pier pilings in Sausalito that I liked very much. The sky and water merged together over the course of a four minute exposure. I used that experience to try something similar. One of the happy accidents of the trip was forgetting a step up ring. My 77mm lenses could not use my 82mm 6-stop and 10-stop filters. But all was not lost! As they say, “necessity is the mother of invention”. It turns out my 77mm NiSi 1-5 stop Variable ND filter has a front thread of 82mm. I was able to put on my 10-stop filter in front of the 1-5 variable and have between 11-15 stops of light blocking power. I played around quite a bit with longer than normal exposures on this trip. While this image is “only” 30 seconds long, I experimented with shutter speeds up to three minutes. What I liked about this image’s shutter speed is despite being 30 seconds long, there are still subtle ripple patterns in the pier piling reflections. Definitely unexpected and a cool little detail. One of the fun challenges of these scenes is looking for an arrangement of pilings where there is adequate separation between the near and far pilings. In this scene, it was impossible to have them all with space to breathe, but I did the best I could.
Well, that’s a wrap! I fell deeper in love with the variety of fish and chips, I mean landscapes found along the Oregon coast. If you’d like to join me, there’s more on my workshop page. And if you read all this way, the bext fish and chips by my standards was at South Beach Fish Market just south of the Newport bridge.
Best to you all,
Jim Patterson
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