Do you like this image?

I have a question for you. Do you like this image? I’ll explain why I’m asking in a minute.

This is personally one of my favorite landscape images I’ve ever taken. I’ve had it printed large and framed, and it sits proudly over the TV in our family room. I get a lot of comments on it and people love the composition and color — and so do I. This is the Bandon, Oregon Lighthouse sitting on the channel between the open ocean and the harbor. I’m taking it from a location across the channel. This photo saved me at a time when I was more or less convinced I was going to toss the cameras in the water and take up knitting. So it has a story to tell — or three.

I took this photo in October, 2015 at 5PM local time. I scheduled a trip to Bandon because (a) I’d never actually stayed there before, merely driven through, (b) my brain was fried and I’d hit a patch in my photography so rough I had decided I was a failure, and (c) it was a chance to go and grab a meal with a couple of virtual friend-photographers (the incredible Steve Dimock, who co-ran the bird Bird Photography community with me on Google+ and took it over when I retired, and his partner Susan Dimock, who is a photography of many styles that if you haven’t discovered her yet, please, go do so.

My head was a shambles. My photography was even more so. I scheduled the trip specifically to put me in a place I was unfamiliar with for a few days with no goals, no agenda no shot list, no pre-conceptions. Just me and a camera, to see if I could sort out why I felt everything I shot absolutely sucked to me. My thought was to just unplug from everything else, take things to the bare metal — literally, factory reset the camera and start from scratch, and see if I could find a way to start taking photos I didn’t hate. And if not, just put the camera in the room and wander around and explore the area and relax.

Sort of on a whim, I bought a set of ND filters and tossed them in the bag, because I’d seen some recent work I liked and I thought I might experiment with them.

So, arriving into Bandon in the afternoon after the drive from Silicon Valley, I checked into the hotel and went out exploring. I did some basic bird photography around the harbor but nothing I felt worthy of keeping, but nothing terrible, either. Day 2 was similar, but in the afternoon I went back to the harbor to a location that had caught my eye with a composition for the lighthouse. The problem — it was a day with those crisp, clear, cloudless skies that make landscape photographers weep; you know that the evening colors are going to be poor and quickly fade to evening grey without any real sky interest to speak of. The kind of evening that many photographers (including myself most nights) would have thought about the local place and the great fish and chips and made a decision to call it.

But, looking at the harbor, I felt this might be a good opportunity to experiment with the ND filters, so I hauled them out. During the experiments, I took this shot, with either a 6-stop or 10-stop, the 18-135 on my Fuji X-T1 (hey, remember when they were good cameras?) and that gave me 25 seconds at F/16 and ISO 100. As you can see, it does a great job of smoothing the water, with just those hints of wave action on the far breakwater.

When I first brought up the image in Lightroom, I loved it, except…..

Secret Story #1: All Photographers Screw Up

Remember when I said I didn’t keep any of the images from the early part of the trip? Remember that I said I’d factory reset the camera as part of my mental “start over" excercise? Yeah.

I shot this in JPG, because I forgot to set the camera to shoot in raw again. So my immediate response was “hey, I really like this image oh crap I’m shooting JPG WHAT THE HELL” - because serious photographers all “know” that you have to shoot RAW to get the most out of their images. Which is true, but… The flip side of that, that if you do NOT shoot RAW you’re stuck with what comes out of the camera and you can’t do much to it. That’s false.

Here’s that image straight out of camera:

Yeah. Remember I’d mentioned the clear, cloudless skies? Clear, cloudless and mostly color free. 2015-Chuq was still mostly on board with the “your images must be ‘photo realistic’ and not manipulated” school of thought. I loved this image, except for the color. So despite my “no manipulation” policy, I started playing with it. If you look at that un-processed image, you can definitely see hints of color both in the water and sky — but it’s really faint and more or less lost. But some thoughtful work on manipulating saturation with a bit of luminance and you see the result.

And I love it.

Everything You Believe is Wrong

So, with one image, I more or less blew up most of what I believed about photography.

• You MUST shoot in RAW: Well yeah, I still almost always shoot in RAW, but if you don’t? There are still opportunities.

• Don’t manipulate your images, they must be true to what came out of the camera: Well, yeah, except when there’s a really great image waiting for you to stop over-thinking things like “photo realism” and start thinking about what it takes to make a great image.

This one image on that one day more or less saved my self-view as a landscape photographer, in part because I was such a screw up and shot it in JPG I felt like I was going to have to throw it away, and I knew from the weather, any chance at a more interesting sky during the trip was definitely not going to happen. And since I was feeling like I loved it but it was going to get thrown away because of the poor color, I was able to set that aside and do the “let’s play and see what happens” to it, and when happened as some serious magic.

That ultimately caused me to shift my attitude about a lot of how I handled my photography, although it took me a while longer to really figure out what my new beliefs were. What it did was open me up to new ideas and a new phase of experimentation that ultimately led to a new style of landscape work I was happy with again. It also taught me a very important lesson:

Creating the image doesn't end with pressing the shutter.

You've just begun the process.

It really brought forward the importance of the digital darkroom, and I know many photographers don’t like hearing that and would rather be out pressing the shutter, but I think they do themselves a big disservice, because the darkroom tools today can massively improve a good image if you put in some time to learn how to use the tools and spend some time applying them thoughtfully. This does not discredit the idea of “you have to get it right in the camera”, either, because it is still true that you can’t “fix it in photoshop” — you’ll merely make it less sucky. Maybe.

But this one shot really led me down a new path in my photography, and it’s an image I look back on for inspiration on those inevitable days when I start feeling everything sucks again, because it proves I can do it, even when things go wrong. I’m not dependent on “magic light” or the inspiration of the muse, I can make my own when I need to, and those layer on bonus goodness when they happen.

One more thing this trip taught me: I’m one of those photographers that needs to study an area and let it steep into my brain. If I walk up to a new location and try to start shooting, I’ll usually meh or hate the results. But spend some time exploring and looking for interesting options? Then I can go back and find the things that really speak to me. So these days, the first day (and sometimes longer) may see me without a camera at all, just soaking it in — unless, of course, the light explodes and does the work for me. I’ve learned to spend longer at locations, rather than shotgun my way through many places hoping one of them creates magic on the fly.

Secret Story #2: Validations

Here’s a second secret story about this image. While I was at the Art Wolfe Photo Workshop in Olympic National Park in 2019, during a break a few of us were talking and we’d pulled up our computers and iPads and were showing images to each other and chattering about them. I happened to have this image up on the iPad and it was laying on a table when Art walked by. He got about one step past us, then stopped, his head swiveled and he came back. He looked at the image for a bit, then said “oh, that’s nice!” and asked me where it was. I told him, and I’m hoping some day I’ll see his interpretation of the lighthouse show up in his work. But to have him have that kind of the reaction to the image really gave me some validation that I was on the right track.

More fun with ND Filters

As I said earlier, part of this trip was to break bread with the Dimocks and chat, which we did with great enthusiasm (and food). After, they hauled me out to an area at the edge of town where there is a beach and sea stacks. I immediately hauled out the ND filters to play some more, leading to this image.

It’s fine — I like it but I don’t love it. This is a one minute exposure at F/11, ISO 100, and I think in retrospect it’s a bit overdone, and yes, I had lost my fear of the saturation sliders by this point…

The star of the show at that location, though, is Face in the Rock. And having shot this, I turned my camera on Face in the Rock to see what I might do with it — just as the fog started rolling in hard. So I ended up in a bit of a scramble, but the end result was this:

I think this is a beautiful representation of the sea stack and you can see the face well. The fog adds a layer of mystery to it. This shot was 9 minutes after the previous, and five minutes later, you couldn’t see the stacks at all, and we packed up and left. Again, I’m boosting some saturation here, but I’m accentuating colors that existed, not creating them out of nothing. I love this image, although I know reaction is mixed with others — some also love it, and some just don’t see the attraction. Which is fine.

This was also a 1 minute, F/11, ISO 100 shot with probably a 6 stop ND filter, as it was getting dark by then even without the fog.

So I head into this trip feeling like a failed photographer, and I come home with two images that I rate as in the small group of “best ever” images, that have the added benefit of looking and being handled basically like nothing I’d ever done before, not even remotely.

Learning Lessons

This trip and these photos offered me many lessons to learn.

The first and most important: always be open to learning new lessons and trying new things.

• Don’t be afraid to question your assumptions and beliefs.

• When you find them to be wrong, be willing to change them.

• Give yourself time to play. Don’t always have an agenda, a goal, a demand to perform, a responsibility.

• If you realize something bad happened — OH MY GOD I’M IN JPEG MODE — run with it and see what happens. Don’t give up, adapt.

• If you try something and it doesn’t work as you expected, don’t toss it out, explore it and see what it brings to the table.

• Feeling frustrated? Feeling like a failure? Yeah — we all do at times. You can use it as an excuse to give up, or you can use it as a lever to push you into new directions.

• Habits are good things because it allows you to focus on the creative instead of the technique.

• But habits can become very bad things when they become so rigid they strangle the creativity or make you unreceptive to anything out of the predicted.

• Which, oh yeah: here is where I tell you to give yourself time to play again.

The light house image as well as the Face in the Rock image are available for use from my collection of wallpaper images, and you’re free to download a copy and use it as a desktop background. I rotate those images on my computers whenever I’m using them, and I know whenever this one pops up, it makes me smile.