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sunrise

An Oregon Coast Travel Tale (Part 1)

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Ok, so what do you do when you travel six hours on a flight pull into the hotel exhausted and wake up the next morning to gray skies and fog? You pray it gets better! That being said praying kind of worked. 

Let me explain. We left our hotel with gray skies and headed for the fog enshrouded coast not knowing if the fog would hold all day – it did. What a disappointment. Our trip down route 101 along the coast was another six hours of not seeing much. The beautiful scenery along 101 was invisible to us as we sped by listening to pod casts our sons’ had downloaded on their phones.

We stopped every once in a while to make a shot or two of the fog covered shore or islands peering through the mist. We did not bother to stop at Cannon Beach as it was covered in fog. When we arrived at our destination on Bandon Beach on the south shore just below Coos Bay we were met with an overlook of incredible beauty but covered by fog. 

We decided to put long pants and hiking shoes on to climb down the massive set of stairs to the beach. We were met with incredible amounts of huge driftwood – wow, a B&W photographers dream.  The driftwood and fog made for some great images.


Plus there was no one on the beach, yay! I had a great time poking around the giant stumps. The fog started to clear a little as sunset approached but we only got a sliver of color. The next morning I was up early hoping for some nice light and I was not disappointed. 


The shot above is not my best one. I have three frames with the flock of geese in it but the thumb nails on my iPad are so small on import I could not tell which one I wanted. 


Walking around in the early morning light on the beach and on the bluff was great, the scenery was outstanding.


As the light rose and made it over the cliff face it was almost like alpen glow the way it just lit the top portions of these giant edifices. I met some nice photogs along the way who were participating in workshops. This the end of part one. More to come on a day of travel to shoot lighthouses in horrible light and another morning among the giant rocks! 

Landscape photography tools – leading elements

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One of the most important elements of landscape photography is the leading element. It’s that one aspect of the image that pulls the viewer right into the frame. On one of my recent tours to Good Harbor Beach we were faced with a very low tide which gave us some very cool mounds of sand created by the tide. This added to the visual aspects of this image by also giving it some texture. The curving structure of the rivulets of sand leading up to the rising sun pulls the viewer into the image.

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I shot this in both horizontal and vertical but the vertical to me is much better. It gives the image more depth.

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The sun star is much better in this image because the sun is lower, but I still like the vertical even if it does have some sun flare from the filter as the sun was higher.

Reflections – A powerful landscape photographers tool

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Last week while on an early morning tour to Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester we were faced with a full moon low tide that seemed to go out forever. Normally this is not a great thing but in this instance it offered our group an interesting perspective on the cliche sunrise photo.

We set up looking for the sunrise over Thacher’s Island and the early morning dawn did not disappoint. It had a wonderful glow about it which started to brighten up the clouds in the south with incredible pinks, yellows, oranges and blues. I kept looking over in that direction at the clouds changing colors and could not help but think that there is a photo there. My Canon 5D Mklll was on the tripod with a longer lens but I had my Sony Nex7 with the wide zoom available. I grabbed this “little” camera and ran down to a large puddle and using the tilting LCD I made some shots at water level of the incredible colored clouds just before sunrise.

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I have shot reflections before and know that the best way to photograph using them is very low at water level. Of course this does not work in every case but in this case it works. The mounds of sand in the foreground give this scene a realistic look not just a copy of the scene above and help the viewer look over to the left following the clouds.

This image is not overdone with saturation and and is very real as the color is how I saw it. In my view it’s important not to overdue things in Lightroom or Photoshop as it takes away from the natural scene. When this image was shown to the folks in my tour we moved down to the small pond and made some great images as the sun came up.

Another successful Cape Ann Photo Tour!