June 2018 Adventure - New Moon Tides Part 1

Ann and I needed to get out again (and how) for a June Adventure; the question was, “Where?”  As we thought of different possibilities, one look at the tide charts showed us that we’d see some of the lowest tides we’ve ever encountered so that meant only one place - the coast!  Which brought us back to the same question, “But where?”  As luck would have it, we wound up at a couple of different places under very different conditions - both of them fantastic for photography!

Given that summer has arrived and school is finally out, heading out to the coast wasn’t going to make for the easiest of planning.  There are several stints in the summer that you really don’t want to even try, and the first week school is out is one of them.  That’s when the folks who want to get their summer trip in early (to avoid the crowds?!?) take their trip.  Nonetheless, I started scouting campgrounds and pretty much found what I had expected - places were pretty much full.  I then tried another strategy - look for a single night.  And I found one site, for one night, on Friday night at Sunset Bay Campground by Sunset Bay (hey Dev - remember that place?).  We decided to go for it and wing it from there.

I’ve been busy at work this year so we headed out later than I’d hoped, but still arrived at the campground and checked in with a couple of hours of daylight to scout around.  That we did and settled on starting out the next morning on the South Beach at Cape Arago State Park.

The morning was overcast, which gave us a very different type of light than we often get at the coast.  That allowed me to think more of the surroundings.  The tides were even farther out than we’d seen the afternoon before (the higher low tide) and rocks that were underwater then were now exposed.  I had originally planned to focus on some rocks down the shore a bit, but wound up taking my time getting there.

It took me about 5 different images before I started feeling like I was making sense of the place.

Eventually I worked my way more and more into the rocks and found a gold mine of plant life awaiting me.

This one bunch of kelp was, as Devon would say, ginormous.  I couldn’t get it all in with my 23mm lens, so I walked back over to my backpack to pull out my 16mm very wide angle lens to make another image of it.

Thank goodness it wasn’t alive and wriggling.  After a bit I realized that I needed to get closer and closer to the plant life to make images that I felt were compelling.  So that’s what I did, and it worked.

You’ve already seen some of the other images and you know what I mean.  

It seems every time I tried to do a “landscape” image, it simply didn’t move me.  Still, from the image below, you can see what I mean by rocks covered in plant life.  I eventually made my way over there from the bunch of rocks I was working on.

And that’s where I really started taking my time to examine what was there and to focus on making sense of the chaos.  As I mentioned, I loved these leaves that took on an opalescent sheen when seen at the right angles.

So I kept at it, moving from rock to rock, seeing what I could find.

I’d occasionally look up, try a landscape shot, feel frustrated, and then look back downward again.  

You can probably tell my preferences that morning.

I spent a lot of time simply experimenting with how to organize different textures and colors.

After nearly three hours of kelp, I finally made it to the rock that I thought I was going to start with.

It’s not a terribly large rock, but if you look closely, you see that it’s a geologic wonder with multiple layers and prehistoric remnants slowly being exposed by the pounding of the surf.

I started at one end of the rock and slowly made my way around it, again trying to play with its different patterns and textures.  By that point, the sun was slowly making its way through the clouds, so occasionally we’d have shadows, only to loose them a few minutes later, and have them reappear a few minutes after that. 

I eventually wound up at the place where I thought I would make my first shot of the day at.

Ann was intently working on a lovely image on a near-by rock so I wandered the few feet over to her.  The shore was full of weathered logs and one that had pink strains running through it caught my eye.

As I returned to Ann at her rock, I too found yet another image that shows the complexity of this little shoreline.

We’d been there photographing well over 4 hours and the crowds were starting to come.  It was time for us to pack up and work our way back up the hill.  We scouted a bit more, hoping to find a good access to the shore on the west side of the park (no luck), but did find one for the north shore (closed for the next month or so due to seal pups).  

Ann made lunch in Beast and we discussed our game plan for the day.  Ann suggested we head down to Bandon and see if we can find a place there.  Worst case scenario, we start heading home and call it a weekend.

If you’ve been following the blog, you should already know whether we were successful or not.