Photographing the Oregon Coast Pt. 2: Southern Reflections

By Tim Truby

Part 2 of a coastal Oregon photo tour made last August. Part 1 is Photographing the Oregon coast.

Landscape photographers based in the South Bay get endless chances to shoot great seascapes. The creative possibilities from Manhattan Beach Pier to the Peninsula down to Cabrillo are endless. The Beach Cities have been my backyard for over 20 years now.

But I’d never seen the iconic Oregon Coast. So the trip was my escape from the South Bay of last August into the (relatively) deserted Pacific Northwest – photographing seascapes from the Peter Iredale Shipwreck to Thor’s Well down to the sea stacks at the southern end of Oregon.

The north of Oregon had been one visual discovery after another. But the southern coast, Bandon Beach, Gold Beach, and the forested seascapes were gonna be equally cool and even more unspoiled.

Into the Zone, Bandon Beach

Bandon has the same endlessly wide beaches of north Oregon – plus sea stacks of immense variety. And being deep in southern Oregon, Bandon Beach is removed from the state’s major population centers, Portland and Eugene.

I liked Old Town Bandon from the start. The main town spreads along the Coast Hwy with supermarkets, gas stations, the usual beach city stuff. But the 15 blocks of the old town, centered around the harbor, is beach town done right. The whaling tours were on hold but there great little fish places, charming shops, a great pastry shop, even a bookstore.

South of Old Town, the Beach Loop Road takes you along the cliff overlooking the beach itself – what makes Bandon special. So I headed along the loop road, stopping now and then to get the layout, survey my canvas as it were. Taking that in gave me the same sense of creative anticipation you’d feel the first time you see Yosemite Valley or Zion.

I noticed the big sea stacks centered at one particular spot. And from the north end, they lined up into the frame at a perfectly nice angle, like a spear pointing out at sunset. But the light wasn’t right yet, so I headed down to the condo to check in and wait till evening.

When Golden Hour arrived, I headed to the northern end of the Loop Road, parked and headed down to beach level, camera in hand. It was almost sunset and the gulls were starting to settle in. There was hardly anyone there. Livin’ the dream, a beach all to yourself.

Sea Stacks on a Chessboard

From the beach, Bandon’s famous sea stacks are like massive chess pieces that tower above you. Many are even named. The idea is to wander into that visual chessboard and give it shape.

There’s a phase transition that takes place when you’re in the creative zone. You see the beauty of the side-light. Wander the beach, moving in and out with the wave flow. The design elements spread across the sand like stones in a Zen rock garden. It’s almost a dance.

The big haystack rock certainly got my attention, planted there with a pile of iconic sea stacks in the distance. And the curve of sea foam across the sandy canvas was a perfect leading line

Seagulls and Sea Stacks, Bandon Beach

Once you move from an overview onto ground level, you’re in it. You’re seeing design choices all about, a big sea stack, some birds, a line of standing water ahead.

The light changes fast at sunset. The colors get thicker, so does the mood. Walking down beach, I noticed sky was reflecting in that standing water. Saw the big rock to the left all lit up, the gulls lined up, half asleep by now. I tried to balance the various levels of the moment into a perfect composition. – Except there was this one sea gull walking out of my frame. “Working with sea gulls, it’s like herding cats.”

I continued to roam the beach, giving the gulls plenty of space. It’d been a long day and I let them rest.

Going Abstract

Once you start noticing how similar the beach floor is to a canvas, all kinds of possibilities emerge. Because every ten seconds, a new wave paints the sandy canvas with foam the color of twilight. And it turns out that zooming in on one or two visual elements – going abstract, has its own rewards. So I spent a while shooting variations on a theme of haystack rock, wayward foam, glowing clouds.

Seascapes can have a visual impact, a mathematical perfection that landscapes just can’t match. Landscapes are immensely detailed: geology, erosion, vegetation that’s been there over the millennium. A seascape is the calculus of wave, tide, and sand that exists for only a moment – like a photographer’s performance art. And occasionally you can hook into the calculus of things.

Blue Light, Bandon Beach

After sunset, I put my tripod back in my pack and headed up to the car. But at the top of the steps I had an intuition – and looked back at the beach one final time. … Cool.

Blue light suffusing a driftwood beach, sunset colors fading to red. All those blue flowers sprinkling the hillside. Now this was interesting. I pulled out the camera again, took the scene in, composed … and noticed, in the distance, someone standing stock-still. Sometimes you need to look in a new direction.

I headed back to my room for the night. The next evening was when high tide aligned with the sunset. I had been waiting for a sunset high tide to shoot Thor’s Well, up in central Oregon. So at 3 PM I headed north. That particular drama is in last month’s Oregon article.

Enjoying the Show, Bandon Beach

But on the next night, my final evening at Bandon, I was ready to capturing the evening colors from the cliff overlook. I went to my spot on the cliff and on this night, the light show was an OMG.

My first evening at Bandon Beach had been a detailed exploration of the beach location from ground level. Balancing sea gulls, waves, sunlight against the sea stacks on a beach canvas. But with a overlook, you can work with more iconic images – the large scale expanses that come with a high angle cliff shot.

This image showed all the Bandon sea stacks, my monster chess pieces, stretching out towards a classic sunset – and one couple at bottom left sitting on a log enjoying the light show. Sweet.

Thoughts on Composition

Composition is the foundation for the photograph; it’s the structure that everything else hangs on – like plot is structure for a movie. But good composition is tough. I took a couple of thousand photos of coastal Oregon in August. And 18 Oregon photographs are in the Pacific Northwest portfolio of the web site.

What does a “good composition” even mean? It starts off with connecting to a place, like one of these Oregon seacsapes. It requires seeing that place as a collection of visual elements, ones that can be fitted into a frame.

Like any art, photography is about making the right choices for each of those visual details. A song writer or musician can make hundreds, thousands of choices in will have thousands of creative choices – from concept to compositional to color palette to brushstrokes.

Now, you could say that photography is just about pushing a button, only one choice there. But great composition is more than that. Say that I see a really cool sunset that’s happening outside my window, just like a hundred other folks in the South Bay. I check exposure, frame it tight and push the button.

There could be a hundred folks in the South Bay who shot that sunset then, a hundred photos looking almost the same. How can that be the “creative vision” of a hundred folks. The sunset was pretty but if a 100 folks just push the button, where’s the creativity? A one element photo is just documentation. A one element photo is documentation, not a one-of-a-kind art work.

But what if I choose to include more visual elements, more artistic layering. In a good landscape, you want to choose something interesting for the foreground, midground, far-ground, sky. You want those elements to entice the eye in. So there’s an endless number of choices for a Bandon Beach seascape. Do I use this sand dune, that sea stack, this bit curve of a wave. Do I go two or three dimensional, iconic or detailed? Do I listen to the light?

Choosing the best ingredients and their placement is key. Which is why a photog can spend a couple hours at that one location, playing with all those elements, distilling that quiet feeling into the frame. A landscape photograph is a series of insights, choices … a journey.

Native Grasses at Sunset

My final days in Oregon were centered around Brookings, 80 miles south of Brandon. Not many towns along this stretch of the coastal highway. But there’s plenty to see, cliffs and deep forest, also long stretches of coastline with untouched sand dunes. And as always on a road trip, I stopped often along the way to sample the possibilities..

And as I drove south of the little town of Gold Beach, I found a stretch with dunes and natural grasses that were a total surprise. So I spent an evening exploring.

The sand dunes below Gold Beach were framed by native grasses and lit up by the evening sun. That was my way into this photograph. But I also wanted that jumble of sea stacks to be in full focus. And when you’re shooting this close, within a few feet of the grass stalks, it’s impossible to keep that and everything else in sharp focus without doing “focus stacking.” It’s one of many photog tricks.

With focus stacking, you take several pictures – each one focused deeper into the frame from grass stalks to dunes, sea stack, etc. Then you combine the shots in Photoshop. The program pulls out the sharpest elements of each into an image like the one above.

But now the sunset was in full swing. And I headed to the other end of the beach to use that light.

Sand Dunes and Sea Stacks

A five minute drive later, I’m at the other end of the beach. With this image, I was a bit higher up, enough to catch the whole layout of the dunes as well as Myers Creek. The sun was quite low now but that made the dune grasses stand out. The dunes and the creek lead the eye into the space.

Reflections, Myers Creek

I headed towards the beach to see how the beach looked up close. It was just past sunset, the light was fading fast. But as I got close to the creek, I noticed the reflection.

Water reflections are something landscape artists particularly like to play with. You’re taking sunset clouds and doubling the impact. Part of the mystique is that reflections have an archetypal association with the mind and imagination – reflecting on cloud or an idea.

So it’s standard procedure to get close. I also used the curve of the creek to lead the eye towards the distant sea stacks. Sweet. Within 5 minutes, the glowing clouds were in darkness, ending my reflections. I headed back to the cabin.

Secret Beach Overlook

Samuel Boardman State Scenic Corridor, just north of Brookings was the last Oregon location I was shooting. And I had 3 days to cover it. It’s an intriguing spot, a park 5 miles long on the ocean side of the coastal highway.

The woods here are as dense as I’d seen anywhere on the coast. An old growth forest that flowed down the hill, along the high cliffs, even onto the sea stack islands, with the Boardman pathways weaving through it all. And since there wasn’t much signage, I found myself on a different pathway every time I headed to Secret Beach. It was like MC Escher in a forest.

Shoot when the light is good. Check. … I was on a path above Secret Beach that ran right along to the cliff edge. Problem was there wasn’t a spot along there that gave a clean shot down on the islands. But this is Boardman.

Sunset, Natural Bridges Overlook

This is the easiest shot to get in Samuel Boardman. Off the 101, turn in at the sign, park, head 50 yards to the fenced in overlook. Other folks are getting a similar (but more wide-angle) shot with their iPhones – but it’s a lovely shot. And I was luckily enough to catch someone hiking midway across that razorback. (Looks kinda scary.) That tiny person shows the scale of the place … and the human perspective.

The View South, Samuel Boardman SP

This view, from the north end of the corridor, isn’t quite as densely forested. So from here I was able to get low enough to capture the cliffs and sea arches between the trees.

I spent two weeks photographing the seascapes along the Oregon Coast. It was a challenge, especially with what the country was going through that summer. Just to smell the pine and cedar and walk the long sand beaches. Then to see the possibilities of a place as art – which takes you deeper into the experience. And now, I’m sitting at the computer and I’m back there again.

Creating landscape art that can take someone to a place they’ve never been, that’s the icing on the cake. I’m also pleased to have a Pacific Northwest Portfolio out there. But I don’t know anyone who does it for the adulation or status that the art world gives to landscape photographers. ;-)

For me it’s about being out there.

Postscript: Sunset and Smoke, Sonoma Coast

But the 3-week photo shot didn’t end in Southern Oregon. As with Oregon, I went on to visit iconic Northern California seascapes: Gualala, Point Cabrillo, Point Arena.

Then I got to Jenner. I checked in and spent a lovely afternoon photographing the Sonoma Coast SP, chatting with all the escapees from further east, checking out the coastal bird sanctuary. But as the afternoon progressed, I ran into an issue. Mother Nature reminded me who runs the show.

The burn was several miles north. But that evening the Post-it on hotel door said one word, Evacuate. That sucked. As I hauled my stuff to the car, a pickup blew by me heading north like a bat out of hell. How suitably surreal.

But the three weeks had been a creative and personal journey from start to finish. There were lots of daily challenges (what with the virus I won’t name). But mostly it was an adventure being out of town, there on the Oregon Coast, savoring the uniqueness of the cliffs, deep forests, sea stacks – and the folks who live in those coastal communities.

People who live anywhere along the Pacific coast have that ocean connection deep in their DNA. They walk their dogs in the early morning, camp on the wide beaches, live their lives with the forest and seascapes around them … even in a time of uncertainty.

These coastal landscapes are sacred. The Oregonians know that just as fully as we do down in the South Bay. And it was fun spending time with the tides, sea stacks and the coastal light. Who knows what’s next.

Tim Truby Bio

Tim grew up an Army Brat, living all over the US plus a few far away countries. So traveling, being out in nature was in the family DNA. He came to the Beach Cities in ’99 and stayed.

Back then, the South Bay was already a hotbed for landscape photography. So he wandered into Pauls Photo and spent a year learn technical camera skills, composition, lighting, Lightroom, etc. Then 6 years ago, Tim decided to do travel and landscape photo art full time.

He’s written two travel photography books, Photographing Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks and Photographing Arches, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks. Tim has been a First Place Winner at the OC Fair Photography Contest and has shown his images in juried and gallery shows around the South Bay. Contact him at 310-480-7237 if you’re looking for landscape art for your home or office.

The above images can be found at: https://www.tim-truby-photography.com/seascapes-pacific-northwest

South Bay seascapes are here: https://www.tim-truby-photography.com/socal-seascapes