Yachats Day 2

Y2 - 1

As I mentioned the previous post, the next day gave us beautiful blue skies.  We decided to go back to the Cape Perpetua area and explore, hoping to scout out good sunset locations and grab a few nice photographs along the way.

Pretty much, that’s the way it went.  Photographs were, . . . well . . . . nice.  Ok. But nothing special.  Face it, it’s fairly easy to take an ok image on the Oregon Coast - it’s beautiful.  For me, as I went through the dozens of photos I took they were . . . uninspiring.  Ok, but nothing much moved me.  Even my penchant for finding abstractions in nature seemed to fall short.  This was about as good as it got that day.

Y2 - 2

But like I said last time, you never know what you’re going to get.  The problem is that, as you get better and better with a camera, your standards get higher and higher so . . . even decent images seem to fall short.  Even Ann is starting to realize it - unsatisfied at perfectly fine photos because . . . .  I wonder if Ansel felt this way.  Well, I know Giacometti did, except he would scrape all the paint off a canvas and start a portrait over again if he didn’t quite get it right - me, I just post them on my blog and say, “Close, but no cigar.”

But I feel a responsibility to share my adventures and, to quote myself again, any day out photographing is a good day regardless of whether you even take a single photos, so I’ll share the day with you.

Y2 - 3

Cape Perpetua is a nice little complex with a variety of coastal areas to explore, a nice look out area on top of the cliffs, and a few hiking trails.  I think it will become a place to explore over time - I’ve been to enough locations along the coast to realize Cape Perpetua has a lot to offer in a fairly compact area.

As you can tell from the above, I guess my failures were not for lack of trying.  From our earlier trip to the coast with Kit and Devon, we learned that the lava flows that created these coastal headlands flowed in from approximately a hundred miles inland over tens of thousands of years.  The contrast between the visible line of rock on the right and that of the left is not from different types of rock, but from lava that cooled slowly and lava that cooled very quickly (don’t ask me which is which, but if I had to guess, the line was a stream of hot lava that suddenly cooled in-place, and the lumps are what built up over time).

Y2 - 5

I tried simple compositions as well that just didn’t work out.  I was up on some rocks looking down at this scene (it’s been cropped a lot) and couldn’t really get down without running the risk of getting hit by the incoming tide.  I guess the older I get the fewer risks I’m willing to take.  Anyway, again, not quite there.  I include this because, having cheated and worked images from the next day, I know there’s a similar image that is much better.  That’s what kind of day it seemed. 

As we were working our way from one area around to another, we came across a giant driftwood tree stump that Ann and I stopped to photograph.  Exactly the type of subject I loved setting up my 4x5 to photograph.

I took dozens of photographs of this thing, thrilled with every image while looking through the viewfinder.  Ann had the tripod so I couldn’t compose with exact precision, but that’s ok, I can crop easily enough in Lightroom and depth of field with the Fuji is so much better than with the 4x5 so a tripod wasn’t necessary.  However, when I carefully inspected the images on my 24” monitor, nothing really moved me.  This was the best of the bunch, and I even preferred it in color to black and white.  Strange, very strange.  I’m going to have to be much more meticulous the next time I come across a subject like this. 

If you’re like me, you love being around water.  Maybe it’s a Taoist thing, maybe it’s something that reaches to our most primitive instincts as a reflection of life, but as you can tell, Ann and I spend a lot of time in places where there’s water, which isn’t hard to do in Oregon, but still. . . .  Even now, it’s raining outside and that sound is somehow comforting.

So when we go somewhere to photograph with water, it’s just not the overall scene we’re trying to compose, we’re trying to capture some special quality about the water.  Often on the coast it’s waves and the feeling of the ocean (rough, calm, dangerous . . .).  What you wind up with, unfortunately, is dozens of images of what at first glance is the same thing, but on careful inspection varies only by the movement and effects caused by water.  If you’re using a tripod, each image is EXACTLY the same except for the water; if hand held, the images may vary slightly along the edges making the decision-making process even harder.  

And then again there are the frustrations of wondering whether a vertical composition is stronger, like the above, or a horizontal is better like below.

I did tell you that photography isn’t easy didn’t I . . . . 

By late afternoon we had pretty much explored and scouted out prospective sites.  We decided to head back, grab dinner then get back in time for sunset.

With full stomachs we returned as the sun was making its way towards the horizon.  The wind had kicked up ferociously (at one point I’d left the tripod standing in place while I leaned over to take some hand-held shots and the wind blew the tripod over) and we knew we were in for a buffeting waiting for the sun to set.

Online I’ve recently seen a lot of interesting photographs by people taken looking into the sun.  I have to say that it’s easier than it looks.  I have dozens of images taken into the setting sun that are, for lack of a better term, bad.  That period when the sun is well enough above the horizon to not have a color cast to it is a difficult time to photograph.

I did, however, get an image that seems to capture the wind we were facing.

Ann and I made our way to lower elevations to escape the pounding of the wind and to wait for the sun to drop.  Like I said, things just didn’t seem to work out right for me even though the light was turning interesting.  I even have a photograph of Ann photographing that is, . . . let’s just say that if I posted it I would likely have to sleep on the couch when I come home in October.  And continuing my “fine” form from earlier in the day, even the abstract compositions didn’t seem quite right.

Eventually the sun made its way down and we got to join the millions of photographers who make sunset photographs on a daily basis.  And I’m joining that crowd that posts them online hoping everyone doesn’t moan and say, “Geeze, another sunset?”

Even worse, I couldn’t decide on just one image, so I stuck you with four.

I’m just hoping that things such as the fortuitous passing of a flock of birds and the magical interplay of waves and light are enough to keep you interested in all four sunsets.

Face it, the Oregon coast is beautiful and deserves a long reflection.