Light and Water - Bandon Edition
My month studying John Sexton ended quite awhile ago, and it definitely had its rewards. In Quiet Light he speaks of being compelled to photograph in that wonderful light one finds pre-dawn and post-dusk light (the latter Ann and I must make more of an effort to take advantage of, despite the greater number of people that linger around at sunset), but also speaks of “listening” to the landscape, and to the image one is developing. And as Quiet Light explains, listening leads to seeing. So as I stood there on the shore at Bandon in the pre-dawn light, unsure of what I should photograph, I listened and after a few minutes I saw, and started photographing. Which leads to another installment of light and water.
Unlike the exploration of light and water I did at the Santiam River, these images come from the play of movement in water and reflected color that I’ve been working on for several years now. From that perspective, I was on familiar turf, which made the exploration somewhat relaxing.
The sense of exploration and motivation for making the images came from the unusual light conditions resulting from the strange haze that seemed to engulf the shoreline and the multiplicity of rocks within most of the frames instead of the solitary rock as is often my preference in these types of images.
That doesn’t mean that the solitary rocks didn’t seem inviting on occasion.
What I found very interesting is that, with this one rock, the changing patterns of the waves coming in offered me very different images with the rock. At one point the whole area around the rock was covered in whitewash, which reflected very little color. That gave a very different impression of the rock than the other images I’d made. It is strange how these images can change from moment to moment - frame to frame.
I returned to photographing the rocks that are farther off-shore. And in addition to the composition of the masses, it became an experiment in seeing how the different stages of waves appeared in the images based on the different shutter speeds I was using.
One tries to get a feel for the rhythm and the cycles of the waves. If you can connect with that natural process, then the resulting images are somewhat predictable and it almost becomes a game with anticipating what is to come. There is, of course, much one cannot know, and that too becomes part of the fun - seeing how the results compare with what you were intending.
Then, of course, there was the haze that kept coming and going in intensity, which would make things darker and seemingly more colorful, only to transition to pale tones.
And I certainly went back and forth between composing multiple rocks (structures) within an image, to largely filling the image with a rock feature.
Sometimes the rock feature was a visually dominant mass, other times I wanted it to seem almost secondary to the surrounding color and movement in the water.
And then there is always the issue of where to place the masses within the frame. Sometimes you’re just not sure exactly where things should be in the frame, so you position things until they just feel right.
And then you move them just a bit until they feel right again.
It was when I dropped the masses to be lower in the frame, so I could include more of the colorful sky, that I realized things were lightening up significantly and I was starting to lose that color. I had been at it for only 20 minutes, but I was mentally exhausted and dawn doesn’t last forever. I looked around to see if there were any more of these images to find, but drew a blank. It was time to move on to other types of images.
Still, it was a rather fun and productive 20 minutes.