I walked along Cannon Beach while the sun dipped toward the horizon. Since I was shooting with the 4×5, I was a little bit too late to catch the sun partially hidden by a sea stack, so instead I decided to experiment with silhouetting them against the setting sun. I was pretty pleased with the result.
This is another image from my trip to Oregon, specifically from Bandon Beach, at the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge.
It was a cloudy evening, so the sunset wasn’t particularly intense. The cloudy sky cast a blue color over the scene softly and evenly, making the exposures pretty easy, though a bit on the long side (seconds, at this point).
To get the leading line, I walked around and watched the patterns that the waves made after the broke. The receding water flowed around rocks and other hard objects in the sand, forming graceful curves like the ones in the foreground here. Since the light was so soft and even, I didn’t need to worry about burning out parts of the image, so I was able to pull in some detail in the sea stacks without needing to use things like HDR. This image didn’t require much editing — mainly dust spotting (I suppose I should clean my sensor).
