Sometimes words fail me.  How does one pay one’s respects when words seem so inadequate to the task?  Everything I can think to say falls so terribly short of what I feel.

The next morning in Bandon was more of the same but different.  We still had heavy overcast skies (in fact, more than the previous day) and we decided to return to the same place.  However, it was warmer (we both had to strip off a layer of clothing that was needed the day before after only a hundred yards or so down the beach), it wasn’t rainy when we got there so we didn’t have to wait around at all, and best of all it wasn’t windy!  Plus, the tide started higher than we’d seen it the day before, but made its way ever lower than it had been the previous morning, so everything looked incredibly different!

It didn’t take too long for us to get antsy to get out again.  We’ve both been working hard and have had little free time to just do the things we’ve wanted to do (like not quite getting around to printing any photographs for the past . . . now 3 weeks).  Ann, as usual, posed the right questions.  (1) Where are we going to next? And (2) What do the tides look like the next couple of weekends?  A quick check of the tide app on my iPhone (Tide Graph) revealed that low-low tide would be around sunrise this past weekend - ideal tide conditions for a weekend in Bandon.

It’s unfortunate that I’ve been remiss in adding new postings, but the reason is plain - I’ve been running ragged simply taking care of things.  And that has not given me much opportunity for creative endeavors (which I hope will change this weekend with a trip to Bandon to take advantage of the low tides/full moon).  As part of my taking care of business, I’ve finally completed transferring my Lightroom images into Capture One.  Creative for me the past couple of weeks has been to periodically glance at images while they’re loading into Capture One, while I’m working on something else (like a brief to LUBA).  So for lack of something better to post, I leave you with one of the images that caught my eye!

Perhaps I should have titled this “photographing to see,” but to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to best describe it.  As you know, I’ve written a couple of posts about “working” an image - when you see something that strikes you and you keep working to make the best image of it that you can.  Sometimes this means (un)subtle shifts in camera placement or lens selection, sometimes it means moving around an object to finally realize what you see.  The thing about that process is that you see something first, and then you have to figure out how to photograph it.  But I’m talking of something slightly different here.  That is, you don’t see it until you start photographing it.  I love the sense of discovery and fascination I feel when I see things this way.

Two weekends ago Ann and I headed out to the Painted Hills for a long weekend.  It had been raining pretty much non-stop for a week, both here and at the Painted Hills, but the forecast was for partly cloudy skies with a chance of showers for a couple of days, so we decided to take a chance on getting some interesting conditions.  As luck would have it, we stayed dry . . . at least for the most part.

Our July adventure had me in an abstract frame of mind.  Blame it on studying Brett Weston that month, or on the photography gods, but I decided to visit my Painted Hills images in black and white much like I had the Palouse images.  I think I was smart to do so.