Tag Archives: pacific

Photographs: Ocean & Coast, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Boats, Yaquina Bay Harbor

September 17, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Boats at anchor at the docks along the old waterfront in Yaquina Bay, Oregon

During our return from Seattle, Washington in late August (2013) we stopped on Portland and then headed over to the coast and took the long, slow, and scenic route back to California. We spent the first day of this drive along the Oregon coast, more or less driving though but stopping frequently anywhere we saw something interesting. For those who don’t know, the Oregon coast might in some ways remind one of portions of the California coast, especially in northern California, but the ocean seems a bit wilder up here and the towns perhaps even further apart.

The town of Newport is one of the larger ones along this route, and it sits next to the large Yaquina Bay, which is crossed by an impressive and old-school steel bridge consisting of a series of arches. We stopped to photograph the bridge and noticed that the old port was nearby, so we detoured down there to see what we could see. Being familiar with ports more devoted to pleasure and tourist pursuits (Monterey Bay, anyone?), it seemed to me that this little area was still more of a working port. We spent enough time here to walk along the waterfront and make a few photographs, mostly of the densely packed boats tied up at the docks alongside the bay.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Ocean & Coast

Cove and Wave

September 13, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A wave washes into a small cove and onto a pebble beach along California’s coastline south of Monterey

I went down to the Monterey, Carmel, and upper Big Sur coast on what seemed like the first warm-season day of the year. I have probably mentioned before that I prefer the off-season for photography – that time of year when there are storms, giant waves, clouds, rain, cold, and all sorts of interesting conditions. As odd as it may sound, I tend to almost stay away from the coast when the weather becomes too nice! (Of course, there is always fog. And in the summer along the Pacific coast, I do mean “always.”) At the first place I stopped to photograph I was feeling a bit of the letdown from the beautiful morning… but as I got out of my car and stood there in shirt-sleeve weather, warm and no wind, and looked out over the slightly misty coastline I started to feel a bit better about warm weather. :-)

A bit later I headed back toward Point Lobos, where I found a bit more surf than I might have expected, and the high tide had brought the water in close to the shoreline. Here I set up right at the edge of a low bluff above this pebble-filled beach, put a wide-angle lens on the camera, and made some photographs of the near-perfect curve of the waves entering the cove and washing up onto the beach, with sea stacks further down the coast line.

Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Urban/Street

Trance Entrance

September 1, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A sign with multiple potential meanings, Pike Place Market

There are so many possible bad puns that could be made about the sign in this photograph, especially considering the city in which it was made and other things that were going on in town at that time. I’ll refrain.

On a free day during a recent trip to Seattle we decided to wander around downtown Seattle and do mostly street photography. We started out near Pike Place Market, where there are abundant opportunities to find not only the coffee and food we were seeking, but also lots of interesting “Seattlish” photographic opportunities. As we walked past an entrancing entrance to the Market, I looked up to see some wildly colorful flowers (not that you can tell here!) growing along the edge of the roof and partially hanging over the sign.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Ferns, Olympic Peninsula

August 28, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Lush ferns grow along a trail through rain forest at Olympic National Park

On this day we initially planned to make a quick foray to North Cascades National Park, but I got a call saying that Olympic Peninsula web cams were showing relatively clear skies and that I should think about changing plans – so I did! Instead of heading north from the Seattle area, we headed west and took the ferry across Puget Sound, arriving to find clearing fog and some partial clouds, but quite a bit of sunlight. Taking the advice of someone who knows the Pacific Northwest better than I do, our plan was to first shoot down in the rain forest and then to head up to Hurricane Ridge near the end of the day.

We started at Sol Duc falls, a short one-mile hike from a parking area at the end of a side road. My mental image of these forests involves lush growth, cloudy conditions, and rain. The first was present, but both the clouds and the rain were missing. In some ways that could be a good thing, but shooting in the forest in the midday sun poses major problems. The main issue is so-called “pizza light,” with deep shadows and bright, sunlit highlights mixed together throughout the scene. When we got to the waterfall, that is precisely what we found. The fall is in a narrow gorge – and while the bottom of the gorge was in deep shade, beams of direct sunlight were striking the white water of the fall. While it might be possible to make a photograph of this subject in such conditions, it made a lot more sense to me to turn my attention to smaller scale subject that allowed me to better control the light – and this close up “intimate landscape” of a twisting group of ferns is one of the results.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: pacific

Boats, Yaquina Bay Harbor

Cove and Wave

Trance Entrance

Ferns, Olympic Peninsula

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.