Blustery Bandon

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.

Ann and I arrived to the beachhead early as usual.  Too early it wound up.  Not that the timing wasn’t just right to get out to our destination at civil sunrise, about 40 minutes before normal sunrise, it’s that it was heavily overcast, windy as could be, and drizzling.  So Ann and I sat for a bit in Beast, enjoyed our coffee and had a bit of breakfast.  After not too long, the drops stopped hitting the windshield so we suited up and headed out.

It was still pre-dawn and overcast, so everything had a cool, gloomy feel to it.  But given our initial feelings about how the morning’s photography was likely to go, heading towards this part of the beach wound up being a good idea.

I’ll get this out now - these were perhaps the worst conditions Ann and I have photographed in.  The wind made a struggle of everything, to include simply getting sharp images.  I wound up usually pressing the delayed shutter release and, with my body on the windward side of the camera, reaching around to grab two tripod legs with my hands and bracing my leg on the third.  Still, I could feel the tripod legs vibrating even while I was holding them.  Now consider that I was often shooting with shutter speeds from 4 to 20 seconds. . . .  I think I’ve got more blurry images from this shooting session than from any other.

Even so, we were fortunate to be there during the lowest tides we’ve ever seen.  Not only were we able to walk out and among rock features we’ve never come close to before, the beach at this area was generally very flat, which meant waves broke some distance away and slowly flowed the 50 to 100 feet towards us ever so gently, and receding ever so gently.  Well, that was most of the time.  Occasionally it was not so gently.  Thank goodness for my water boots.

Once I started focusing on the unusual way the waves were coming in, I also began noticing how the wind would blow different textures on the water.  So I started trying to photograph the patterns created by those winds (I should have also experimented with much faster shutter speeds).  And, of course, while I was concentrating on that, I also began to see other things happening with the water.

My theme became composing images where the water was doing different things.  And while I noticed that the skies did their Bandon thing (even when overcast!), I told myself to keep focusing on the water theme because the color from the skies wasn’t going to last too long.

And I was right.  Still, because we timed it towards the nadir of the tide change, the transition from lowering tide to rising tide meant that we had somewhat similar conditions for quite some time.  Which gave me lots of opportunities to experiment with different subjects with my water theme.  

The fun thing about studying the landscape while making photographs is that you begin to see things that you initially didn’t notice.  For example, as I was focusing on the textures in the water with the image below, it dawned on me that there was an amazing mix of colors in there too, and that would only add to the effectiveness of the image when combined with the different water patterns and textures. 

After about 2-1/2 hours of photographing in a driving wind, Ann and I were pretty much exhausted.  The low tide was lovely, and we had another morning of low tide to catch the next day.  Also, more and more people were walking the beach (the parking lot was full for the first time we’ve ever been there) and, especially for Ann, finding photographs that didn’t have people’s footprints in them was becoming harder and harder.

So after one last image, we decided to call it a day.  For a photography session that I doubted would yield any positive results, this one definitely proved me wrong.