Moonlit Sand Patterns - Ona Beach, or "Watch where you're stepping, Stupid!"

For Ann and I, a trip to the beach usually isn’t just a trip to the beach.  We rarely just head out to the coast on a whim because we’ve found that all too often, doing so leads to photographic disappointment (usually a totally fine day on the coast, but nonetheless lacking in photographic pleasures).  Truth be told, our trips to the coast tend to be governed by tide tables, and on occasion the phases of the moon as well.  The ideal is to arrive at a low, or about to become low tide at sunrise.   That way we have fresh, untrammeled sand for our photographs.  Which, as we have learned the hard way, can become trammeled by yours truly if we’re not careful.  So, in theory, we’ve developed a technique where we walk along the uppermost reaches of the former high tide (wet sand is so much easier to walk on than dry sand) and only move towards the water when we think we have something to photograph.  And when we want to move down-beach, we walk back to the wet-dry edge to walk where we see something else.  Same thing about approaching a subject - you don’t necessarily want to get too close to it because more than once (for each of us), we’ve decided that moving the tripod back a few more feet makes for a better image, only to find a footprint and three tripod holes in the sand at the bottom of the “better” image.  

That said, like most things, making sure you don’t ruin your own images is sometimes easier said than done.

A couple of weekends ago Ann and I pulled out the camping gear and headed out for a weekend at the coast.  We’ve grown impatient waiting for the Sportsmobile, still at least another 6 months away (yes, that’s agony you hear in our voices), so we’ve decided to stick to our old pattern and put the camping gear to good use.  This time we reserved a campground near Seal Rock, one of our favorite locations to photograph, and reserved it 3 weeks in advance (the tides thing . . . ).  Little did we realize that it would fall on a weekend where Eugene topped 100 each of the 3 days we were gone.  Lucky us.  

It was a strange weekend in that I think both Ann and I needed a break as much as anything, so while we did some photography, we didn’t push it and wound up exploring quite a bit.  Hey, we even walked around some areas without our cameras.  We called it scouting locations and, well we were pretty successful.  We found a part of the Seal Rock area we hadn’t discovered before (way south on the beach over another bunch of rocks), a relatively recently opened State Park located inland a bit in a marsh area (the ranger there said they’ve had bear, cougar, eagles and plenty of other wildlife there - thank goodness for benevolent donors who decide to buy up the better part of a valley and then just give it to the state), and Ona Beach.  

Now, we had heard of Ona Beach before and seen some very interesting rock formations online (you can check it out on Google Images), but had failed to find the rocks on our last trip out there.  We decided to try again and decided that we’ll hike south on the beach quite a ways in hopes of finding the rocks and seeing if it’s all it’s cracked up to be.  Well, a mile or so down the beach and there they were.  And yes they are.  While not tall, they’ve been shaped by the waves and there’s plenty to photograph.  Ann and I decided that Ona Beach was the place to be the following morning.

So we got up at 3:30, drove the 6 or so miles from the camp site to the Ona Beach parking lot and, after brewing a pot of coffee and having a mug, headed off in the dark.  It’s quite a trek from the parking lot to the rocks - not hard, but you have to go through a wooded area and hike a ways to get to the beach.  Once at the beach, the shoreline is some ways away, so we tromped westward until we hit hard sand.  We then hung a left and started south.  After a few minutes, Ann realized we had a near-full moon that, despite being hidden by fog, lit up the entire beach, so she turned off her flashlight.  

That stretch of beach from Beaver Creek to the rocks is, to put it mildly, pretty boring.  Even in moonlight.  Well, especially in moonlight because, while you can somewhat see what is around you, you can’t see any details, especially in the distance.  Ocean on one side, sandy sea cliffs on the other, and beach straight ahead.  After trudging for awhile we could finally see the a dark line up ahead.  They slowly grow into a dark band so we start walking even faster.  Soon they’re rocks and you can see the sculpted forms.  Impressive even from a distance.  At night.  Under moonlight shrouded in fog.

Suddenly I look down and stop in my tracks, doing my best imitation of the Road Runner.  “Hey Hon, check this out!  Wow!”  Ann catches up, and says, “You and your sand patterns.” and walked on.  So I yell, “I gotta take this, I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”  And I set up my tripod to take a few images, and then move onward.

Back home, I immediately gravitated towards this image and it was the first image I worked on.  I tweaked a bit in color, then moved it into black and white and worked on it some more.  This is what I developed. 

Yeah, you see it too.  Actually, I didn’t see the footprint off to the left until I was done working with the image and I blew it up full screen on my 30” Apple Cinema Display.  At that size, it’s larger than my thumb and looks, well, atrocious.  

One step too far.  Why wasn’t I paying attention to where I was walking - paying attention to the now instead of looking up ahead to where I was going to be?  

As I’ll discuss in a later posting, I’ve rigged up my camera LCD to show me things in a 5x7 aspect ratio, which is what the above image is in.  There was something about the arcing lines on the bottom left and right corners that I felt helped suspend the image in the frame.  But that was not to be given my misstep.  

So I decided to take a fresh approach to the image and turned back to color.  There I realized that, indeed, the color and light added a bit of the mystery of the light source, so I worked on those aspects of the image.  Then I set about exploring how to best crop it.  Wanting to stick to traditional aspect ratios I first tried my old love - 4x5.  With that aspect ratio I could exclude the footprint and keep the right edge pretty much where it was.  However, that left the image unbalanced, with the darker parts of the image heavily to the left and weighing it down.  So I tried 1x1 - the square format that I never quite grokked even though I loved using my Rolleifex TLR and a Hasselblad in the past.  The square format cropped into the edges of the black masses, totally ruining the bigger form of the sand pattern.  So I wound up with a custom crop, excluding the footprint to the left and brining in the right edge until it just felt right.

Here’s how it turned out.

The lesson here is, pay attention to where you’re stepping.  You wouldn’t want to ruin a photograph!