It's an old joke that if you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes, but on the Pacific coastline throughout Oregon and Washington, it's amazingly true. You can be on the beach, enjoying clear sky, and ten minutes later the fog rolls in and the entire atmosphere of the place has changed dramatically. When I first started photographing on the coast, I longed for nice clear days, with nice blue sky and Ansel Adams clouds. That's not what the coast is like, though.
Instead, you get mornings where the beach is shrouded in mist - either the thick fog, or even just heavy haze. The mist coats everything - your face and hands, your clothes, your camera and lenses. It can be so heavy that it warps the cardboard sleeves of the readyload film packets I use, or makes it hard to keep the lens clear. It used to just drive me nuts, but more recently I've realized that I've got quite a few nice photographs made on the beaches during those misty/foggy conditions - images that were hard to print well on gelatin silver, but which really benefit from the increased flexibility of being printed digitally.
| My favorite beach locations are places where streams empty into the ocean. The water flowing across the beach, interacting with the tides, produces tremendous variety. In those places, the process of the beach is exposed in a different way from the rest of the beach, and those spots tend to have a very intimate feel. In the fog, that sense of intimacy is often heightened substantially. |
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| The limited vocabulary of 'fog' and 'mist' is not really adequate to describe all the atmospheric conditions we lump together. There's ground fog, surface fog rising from water, low lying clouds - the list is endless. Each type is different, and each type is produced by and is influence by the landscape differently. Sometimes, as in this case, you get conditions where two types of fog are present - and the result is usually a very unusual photograph. |
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| I had just finished up making several exposures of rocks and tide pools, and had packed my camera to head out and get breakfast when I turned around and saw this - ground fog trapped in the basin where Cedar Creek empties into the Pacific on Ruby Beach. I had just enough time to expose four sheets of film before the freshening breeze blew it all away. |
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| Our rewards as photographers sometimes come at
strange times - I made this exposure after sitting on Ruby Beach
in the rain for a long time, hoping for a break. Just as I
had nearly decided to give up, the rain stopped, the mist
cleared just a bit, and I made this exposures, which I like
quite a lot.
I've been to this spot so many times, I've named the three center foreground rocks Huey, Dewey, and Louie. |
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| I like being on the beach alone, but I was on
the beach with three good photographer friends on this morning.
Three of us were facing the ocean, and the fourth saw this sun
break start. Moments like this usually don't last too long. I was in such a hurry that rather than carefully labeling my exposed film, I was just dropping the exposed Readyloads into my open pack - after the sun break faded, I had to sit down and put labels on all of it. |
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| I don't like to take my camera along when I
teach a workshop - it's just too tempting to make photographs
instead of helping the workshop particpants.
After this last summer's workshop wrapped up, I had a chance to make this exposure right from the parking lot of the restaurant in La Push. |
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