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.
| Sometimes, things just come together - soft open sky lighting, pleasant clouds, some appealing ground fog, a beautiful reflective tide flat, and a simple composition. When it happens, you tend to remember the exposure clearly - and I remember that on this particular morning, it was darn cold even though it was early summer. I was glad I'd brought gloves. |
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| I love low tide. When there's a really deep low tide in the morning, there's always a really high tide the night before. It's as if the ocean has rolled in, and erased the marks on the beach, then rolled back and exposed beautiful expanses of untracked sand, just for me. |
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| I love ground fog, especially in the early morning like this. The fog lends a sense of depth to the beach that's hard to capture at other times. Often, the ground fog is thin enough that the clear sky is visible overhead. It's a lovely condition but it doesn't last long. As soon as the sun rises high enough, it's gone. |
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| In the very early morning, before the sun is really up, there's a tremendous sense of solitude on the beach, especially when the low tide occurs right near sunrise. Everything seems to stand still - the wind pauses, the tide pools become completely still and perfectly reflective - as if the beach is holding its breath for a moment before the cycle starts up again. |
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| When it's foggy on the Washington and Oregon coast, it's a different experience. The shapes of the headlands that punctuate the coast, and the shapes of the rocks that dot the beach - the shapes sometimes seem to loom close, and other times seem to be hiding, with their presence only hinted at. |
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Each tidal cycle, each storm surge, the beach gets completely
adjusted. The tide pools you see this morning might be
gone tomorrow - the rocks you see might even be buried under
stand. Each time I head to the beach, there's a little
rush of excitement as I discover new things in a familar place. This particular tide pool emerged in a spot that had been covered in sand the previous year - only the top of the largest rock had been visible. |
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