I Remember You
Oregon · USA
Perhaps my fondest memories of childhood stem from the times we'd load up the car with camping and fishing equipment at zero dark thirty and head due west to rendezvous with family friends, staking out two or three consecutive campsites at Fort Stevens State Park and other campgrounds along the Oregon coast. From there, it was pretty standard fare with campfires, bike rides, beachcombing, and fishing for surfperch and Pacific tomcod...though perhaps with a Southeast Asian twist: we typically wandered out onto the tidal flats at low tide armed with clam guns, a mob of maritime gangsters hellbent on collecting gobs and gobs of ghost shrimp to use as bait. Man, that was SOME experience...plunging your arms into the two-foot-deep hole quickly filling with ice-cold sandy water and pulling out as many of the clawed little demons as you could muster without getting pinched. Every once in a while there'd be high-pitched little-girl screams...even though there were no little girls about. None of these ever emanated from me, of course...
Little did I realize then how precious those halcyon days would be. Times change, lives change, and nowadays I find my childhood bond with the sea as gossamer as a spider's silken thread. There are no family trips to the beach anymore but for rare occasions when we've been able to plan it with the niece and nephew who live up in Bellingham, Washington. And even though landscape photography would seem to be a natural impetus to get reacquainted with the coast, it hasn't played out that way thus far as my preference for marrying exercise with photography generally leads me to the Columbia River Gorge or the mountains. So when my buddy Jeff Chen shared his hankering to shoot the coast with me recently, I was game to join him, exercise be damned. I was skeptical that the overcast skies would evolve in our favor, but Jeff's led me to the light before, and I was in the mood for some ocean air regardless of what the photo gods might or might not grant us.
That said, people look at me like I'm a three-legged unicorn when I tell them I have no idea how to shoot coastal scenes. Having spent almost the entirety of my first five years of photography deep in the forest or high up on the mountainside, I was definitely out of my comfort zone as I approached Haystack Rock bit by bit, pondering it and my surroundings every step of the way. All the while the sky was changing fast as the sun sank relentlessly, and the good light was mostly sequestered behind a marine layer way off on the distant horizon (though I think Jeff managed a few nice shots with the clouds). With time running shorter and shorter I ultimately forsook the effort of capturing the cloudscape in favor of a composition that would engender a sense of gravitation...of returning toward something that struck me as almost alien even though it was once very, very familiar. I settled on this composition consisting of seven focus-stacked images plus a 7-minute exposure for the sky highlighting some subtle sand ripples in the foreground. Groundshaking? Hardly...but as a maiden voyage into coastal photography, I guess it'll do. But more than that, it just felt good to finally be back on the coast, breathing in that fresh salt air.
A guy could get use to this all over again...
