The first morning in Shelter Cove was filled with fog. And it was the kind of morning fog when the air is still and quiet. It was moving, swirling, raising and falling back to Earth breaking into myriad of due drops.
We chased the fog around but it was tough to find a good view point to get a good photos of Shelter Cove in fog. Eventually we found one:
After that we dived into the fog and went to Black Beach:
As I wrote a while back Photography Starts on a Plane. My photographic journey to Shelter Cove starts on an airplane too. This time our seats were over an airplane wing, which limited a view out of our cabin window to pretty much the wing only. That did not stop me from photographing. I just focused on lines and graphics of the airplane wing and specular lights created by the Sun.
Flying thru a cloud:
Back in May my family and friends took a trip to Shelter Cove. It is a very small town located in the area with an intriguing name The Lost Coast. It is the only section of Pacific US coast that does not have Highway 1 following the coast. Once you get there you’ll understand why. Mountains with steep drop-offs come directly to the ocean. There is a small piece of flatland squeezed in between the mountains and the ocean. And that’s where Shelter Cove is located.
The road there is hard: long, narrow, windy and slow. That kept the place remote and less developed than the rest of the Pacific coast. There was no cell phone coverage, no Internet access, which made it into a nice experience. Suddenly there was so much time for family fun and games once those distractions were removed.
While this was a family vacation there was still a little bit of opportunity for photography. With the next few posts I’ll share the images and experiences I captures during the trip.
Let’s face it – electricity together with wires and poles are here to stay for a while. 🙂 So, what do you do when you see great light, great color, but electric pole and wires get in your way? Well, the only things to do is to make them part of a composition.
One advantage of taking a road trip instead of flying is being able to see and photograph things along the way. At least that’s the theory. Once I’m in driving mode, I’m in driving mode, I want to zap as fast as possible to my destination. I still can see things around but I don’t stop to photograph.
That was the case up to my last trip to Palouse. I’ve made it rule to stop at any point I find interesting along the way. And I did, even if it meant turning around and driving back. It meant turning off my driving mode and being more aware of landscapes around.
It paid off with this photo.
Couple more images of the same place – horizontal:
And vertical:
Sometimes you chase the light and sometimes you need to wait for it.
By the afternoon of the second day the sky started to clear and I started heading back home. I still wanted to stop by a few places on my way home. One of those places was a large canola field that I saw on my way to Colfax.
In the first day with no sunlight in the first day the canola field looked dull and uninspiring. But with the light and shadow spots moving across it I thought it could be interesting. With a sunlight on it the canola field was bright yellow. The kind of color my son loves because it is warm and happy.
I drove around the field looking for a composition. I could not quite anchor the composition around anything, because there was not anything in the field. And just as I almost gave up I saw and intricate play between light and shadow which shaped up the field into something that was interesting to photograph by itself.
Clouds were moving very fast. By the time I stopped the car, got out of the car, setup tripod, put a camera on tripod the cloud moved on and shadow that was shaping the field was gone.
Sometimes you chase the light and sometimes you need to wait for it (or, to be more accurate, in this case wait for a shadow). The next two hours I’ve spend waiting for another cloud to come in… and here is the photo I was waiting for:
After dreadful first day in Palouse the second day everything a landscape photographer could have dreamed of. The sky was filled with puffy clouds moving fast across the sky dragging spots of light across the land. All I had to do was watching those light spots highlight something interesting in the landscape.
I enjoy chasing light and shadow moving across the landscapes, its continuous change of scenery. It is like looking in kaleidoscope. There is an infinite amount of beauty in it and all you need to do is watch.
Here are two photos of the same place and same composition but different light. The first one is about the barn, since the light is on it: 
And the second one is about fields behind the barn, since they have light on them: 
Which one is better? Not sure. They are just different and I like them both.
Here is one more example. The white silo stands out of landscape with the light on it and a cloud shadow behind it: 
And here it blends with the landscape: 
Last weekend I made a short two day trip to the Palouse – an area in Eastern Washington famous for its rolling hills covered with patches of fields. It is very beautiful and photogenic place. Some call it American Toscana.
My first day of the trip in the Palouse was dreadful. Grey solid sky, no light, little color. Just as if it could not get any more discouraging, suddenly the rain started. It was pouring down heavily. Most people would stay home in that weather. Not me. I went on scouting around.
The rain stopped just as suddenly as it started. Heavy clouds and soft light were majestic.
I even caught a glimpse of warm pink glow in the sky from a light of the Sun settling for the night.
Just one small piece of advice: don’t drive dirt roads there when it is wet. The dirt is a fine grain clay that becomes extremely slippery when wet. You’ll lose any control over your car. I am talking about it from experience.
There is certain set of topics that popular on photographic blogs. Style is one of them: what it is, how to get your own style, etc.
I typically stay away from repeating what has been said already but I have something to add to a conversation about photographic style. I’ve seen a style is often being confused with consistent look, subject or concept.
I can make my images look certain way and say that is my style. Think of Instagram and applying the same filter or set of filters to all your images, or making only HDR, tin type, etc. Can it be my style style? What make it mine?
Once, I remember, I asked a fellow photographer what kind of photography he does and his response was "I do HDR photography". I thought it was an odd way to define your own photography. HDR is just a tool, a software. Defining yourself as HDR photographer is like saying I’m feeding images into this tool and like all that comes out on the other end.
Let’s say I found my own secret recipe to make my photos look unique. Well, it will be unique just for a short while before someone figures out how to reproduce it. Second, I refuse to believe that the sole purpose of a photographer is to feed images into a tool that produces consistent look and the same look can look good on all photos.
Next thing that is often misinterpreted as style is concept, an idea that is implemented in all photos, a subject or set of subjects photographed in a certain way. For example, photos of Lego figurines repeating compositions of famous photos. Or photographing monkeys with interpreted-by-people-as-smile expressions on their faces. Or light painting.
Can the concept be your style? I feel it is much closer to style than image look itself. I’ve seen some amazing photos of water drops with interesting lighting that produced surrealistic images. Concept can be certainly more unique and harder to reproduce than look alone.
The danger though is in getting stuck with one concept and becoming repetitive. There is also a risk of focusing too much on concept and forgetting about other aspects of photography. For example, you’ve come up with a concept of photographing certain subject in a landscape. Make sure that it is a decent landscape, horizon is leveled and light is good.
Somewhat close to concept consistent subject is sometimes referred to as style. Let’s say I photograph only flowers, or waterfalls, or sunsets and call it my style. Same question comes to mind – how this can be my style, what makes it mine? Many other photographers might be photographing exactly the same subject.
So if we put consistent look, subject or concept aside what is left to define style? Style is my unique perception of the world I photograph. There is something ephemeral about images that is common thru all the photos and reveal photographer’s soul. It exposes my personality. It is self expression.
I struggled for a long time to have a style, just like many other photographers did, until someone else defined it for me. After looking at my images that person said that they all look “dreamy like fairy-tale”. That’s exactly how I feel when photographing and it comes thru in my photos.
Now a few years later I realized that the reason I’ve struggled to find my style was that I was looking for the wrong things. I don’t have consistent look, subject or concept. I like to experiment, try something new. Photographing the same makes me bored. It puts my mind in an artificial box and my mind starts a rebellion.
If you struggle to find your style, feel unhappy about what you photograph, may be you should try something new. Maybe you’ve put yourself in an artificial box while your style is outside of that box?
Recently I went with a fellow photographers to photograph rhododendrons which are common on eastern hills of Olympic mountains. We were hoping for fog to have a good separation of rhododendron bushes from trees in background.
There was fog but not where we needed it. The only option left was to use shallow depth of field. My fixed 50mm lens got second life. I had not used it for a while but it was most appropriate in that case since it had the widest aperture of all my lenses.
Rhododendron
The other options was to let it blend with with forest, make it part of it.
Spring Green
Did I mention there was fog but not where we needed it? Well, we ended up spending most of the time photographing that fog that was somewhere else:
Fog Over Lowlands
Fog Over Puget Sound
vitali prokopenko | fine art 