A WINTER COAST

This was hard to set up for because it was absolutely raining buckets, and came at the end of a very long and difficult day. I looked, chuckled weakly and kept walking, came back, left and got halfway up the trail and came back again muttering. I was convinced I didn’t have the right focal length, was sure the lens would fog up immediately because of the rain, et, etc, excuse, excuse, was genuinely pissed to be forcing myself to take the shot when a nice dry truck, towels, a change of clothes and a thermos of hot tea awaited. Not to mention the 2 hour drive home.

I’m not sure I’ve succeeded, though today I really like it. The problem with moody images, the moods don’t always align. Suffice to say the mood of the print is a good match for the wet disheveled mood of the photographer at the time. I do like the clear sharp grasses in the center of the foggy surroundings, looks like I wiped a clear spot on my lens with a dirty mitten. And regardless of how I feel about it, I’m sure it’s better than no attempt at all.

Details:
Contorted Spruce, Beach 4, Kalaloch
5×12 camera, 150mm Emil Busch WA Apalant

Details:
Bulkhead, Alki
5×12 camera, 300mm Xenar

Here’s a rarity for the Washington coast (interior too for that matter), basalt.. I fear rockheads won’t find much diversion around here, it’s either flood basalt or pillow basalt or columnar basalt or…Perhaps only the Moon has more basalt than Washington state.

But still the forms can be breathtaking. If given the chance, do visit the scoured alien landscape of eastern Washington- some of the columnar basalt forms along the coulees and dry falls are altogether astounding, like the work of a prehistoric race of giant freemasons. Here on the coast the rock seems to vary only in stages of erosion, like partial meltings of grander rock, but it’s saved from monotony by interactions with water and life. I don’t like treading upon the incredible habitats some of these rockforms can become since I speared a starfish once with a tripod spike, but this rock was relatively barren, almost like a dim meteor pushing through turbulent space, and seemed a reasonable metaphor for my progress in the void.

Details:
Basalt and Tide, Crescent Bay
5×12 camera, 250mm Fujinon WS

Local spaces are wonderful. The more often you go the more you’re rewarded. A mile from my house, it surprises me whenever I have Crescent Beach to myself, and I do very often, early and late in the day. It’s such a close, wild place. A faint scalloped departure from the heavy maritime traffic of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, so shallow you could almost wade to the horizon. When the tide is low the beach is enormous and ever changing. High bluffs and basalt shelves and a mingling of fresh and salt water in the Salt Creek delta that are habitat to bald eagles, Canada geese, great blue heron, coots, grebes, kingfishers, oystercatchers, scoters, harlequin ducks, buffleheads and myriad other birds beyond reckoning. It’s a shame is that large format work is so slow; the lid of my fastest lens shutter feels like a lazy blinking eye always well behind their movements. So I have to settle for the more sedate pace of tides and shifting sand bars.

Details:
Salt Creek Delta, Crescent Bay
5×12 camera, 360mm Yamasaki Commercial Congo

Can something so obvious ever be successful? I used to scoff at the Dramatic landscape, or at least snort at it. Much better to be there than to just see pretty pictures of it. They can be the visual equivalent of a Robert Goulet strain. If not an outright assault upon taste and reason, then at least a thorough inconveniencing. Overblown contrast, oafish light. Thrustic (if I may coin a word) geometry.

But living here on the Olympic Peninsula, well. It changes things. How can you not take a photo of this? The sun was just rising over the mountains and chasing the fog flowing into the lake and I’m surprised I didn’t fall into the lake in my haste to get set up. The great fortune of being in this scene staggered any intellectual interpretation of it. Maybe that’s good, who knows. I have since wondered how a photographer such as Robert Adams might have interpreted this scene, or if he would have at all. Maybe the art would be in leaving it be, not recording it at all, not belaboring the obvious. Perhaps my moving here and working here uncovered a fundamental laziness in my aesthetic sensibilities; just coast and let the landscape contort me to it’s liking, without much thought other than Gee. I can shrug it off as visual doggerel, downplay that I’m affected. But whatever. Involve the senses, nudge some instinctual need for loveliness, endeavor to find symbolic parallels in the human experience. Or not. There’s honesty in any reaction, even if it can’t be readily explained, or even welcomed.

… even if it’s only the dreaded Oooh, lucky shot!

Details:
Tidal Fog, Lake Crescent
5×12 camera, 360mm Yamasaki Commercial Congo

A iconic shape of the Straits of Juan de Fuca is the serpentine form of a cormorant. On the road to Neah Bay cormorants augment the shoreline with their all but constant flightless gliding- they aren’t flightless birds but they do look it oftentimes, sitting atop pilings and stacks, wings open and trembling in the wind like a hope that they might someday rise.

I say this and my wife says, They don’t produce the oils like a typical seabird, she says. They’re just drying themselves.

But characteristically I cant get beyond the mythic self-assigned notions, and the birds retains their doomed poetic status in me feeble pea brain.

Although right off 112 it’s an awkward place to reach. The bluff is covered in lush vegetation most of the year, such that it’s difficult to see your footing. But in winter the vine maples and alder are bare and the horsetail recedes and it’s not too difficult to ease down using a culvert sock as a rope-assist of sorts.

I keep going back, not because I want to improve on this image, though that’s certainly possible. The proximity and sharp delineation of the spot have a dropping-off feel to them, the sounds of traffic close like voices at the door of the wardrobe. It’s nice to just sit and watch the utterly silent glyph-shaped birds as they unfold and try to conjure the ether.

Details:
Cormorants and Seastack, Bullman Beach
5×12 camera, 250mm Fujinon WS

This still needs work, but it’s marginally better than the runaway crap of the overexposed, pyro streaked flarey negative I came away with. Right now I like the overblown drama of it because I rarely treat myself to such Wagnerian moods, but I’ll most likely tone it down in future versions. For now I’m enjoying the sky immensely, the converging wedges of the river and Bay and gravel bar fading into the slope of the Seiku headlands and the pale tendrils of the twilight storm…As long as I don’t look too closely at the trees…

What to do with those trees though. The pathetic wind-beaten tide-stunted spruces on the gravel bar. I have really failed them and they really were what I was after, what drew me to the scene primarily. When I was there they looked so defeated that they each seem to be leaning on the one in front, a cascading slump that really looked magnificently wasted in the gathering storm. An elegant if irrequisite surrender with still the whole night and indeed the whole winter ahead. Alas, here they just…clump.

Ah well. Overcompensate and hope for the best.

Details:
Twilight, Clallam Bay
5×12 camera, 150mm Emil Busch WA Apalant

If you get up early enough you get such places to yourself. I don’t know why being alone in such a place is important, but it is. You could hide an invading force in these beach logs, but still. It’s easy to get suckered into a pre-wheel mindset, a superficial loneliness that’s a matter of salt in the hair rather than the spirit, yet I get lost and baffled when I even think about it. My wife and I used to camp in such places. The sleep amongst the sounds of breakers and the siftings of cold fogs and mineral smell of salt air and wet basalt is something to be experienced. And relived; such that even inconvenience and rainy day grumpiness becomes a sweet memory.

I wonder if size every really leaves its mark here. The place is huge, but close in ways that altogether befuddling. I keep coming back up for the spectacle of the Pacific, the force entire. But it’s the smallness, the trees that are orderly even in their deadness, the gestures of sand and waves around buried logs, the blanket size patches of fog that I want to take home and print.

Drifting along the updrafts of these waters, buffered in fog like a kid in a big soft towel. Already half-gone wading in the tide. 15, 20 feet out and you are lost forever.

Details:
Leaning Tree, Rialto
5×12 camera, 250mm Fujion WS