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Yaquina Head Revisited

Those of you who have been following along with my blogging about my trip to the Oregon coast last month are by now probably thinking that this "trip" is never going to end.  First of all, thanks for reading and sharing the experience with me.  And secondly, thanks for your patience as I try to make my way through all the images that were taken and give an account of the amazing time that I had while out there.  

The Yaquina Head Lighthouse was one of our first stops on the trip, but a few of us decided to make a return visit to this location a couple of days later.  It is such a cool and interesting location with lots to see, and we just couldn't do it all the first time around.  One of the things I wanted to do was follow a trail that led up to the top of a bluff overlooking the lighthouse and natural area.  Not surprisingly, it was a mostly cloudy morning, but the sun would peak through every once in a while to light up the scene.   

Yaquina Head Lighthouse

Heading up the trail, I wasn't quite sure if I was going to have a good view of the landscape.  As I watched, thick fog was moving in from the north and at times would almost completely obscure my view.  The photo below shows what I was looking at some of the time as I was hiking up the trail.  I have to admit, it was beginning to look like this hike wasn't going to pay off with any good images.  

Here's another, zoomed in, view of the lighthouse.  Not exactly what I was going for...

And just for fun, and something a little more technical for the 'photography nerds' out there (the rest of you can skip this part if you want).  The image below is the exact image shown above.  This demonstrates the powerful new "Dehaze" feature in the most recent Creative Cloud version of Lightroom.  By simply dragging a slider in the software, the fog mostly disappears and takes the image from being virtually non-usable (except to show how foggy it was) to an image that can be worked with.  You can even see the birds in the water!      

OK, enough with the technical stuff.  To this point in the trip, I hadn't taken any photos of flowers.  There just so happened to be lots of wildflowers along the trail I was hiking.  Since the scenery below wasn't much to look at, I turned my attention to some of the details on the ground.  And yes, I even went with selective color on one of these.  Why not try something a little different every now and then?  

Hiking on up the trail, the fog just kept coming in, but sometimes clouds and fog can make a nice moody image.  So I thought I would give that a try and see what I could come up with.   

The photo below is a 12-shot panorama, stitched together and processed in Lightroom.  It turned out to be a nearly 110 megapixel image!

Finally, after taking a few shots of fog and flowers, things started to clear up a bit.  The fog moved out almost as fast as it came in, as it was pushed along by the ocean breeze.  That's when I was able to take the image at the opening to this blog post.  Although it doesn't really fit in with the order of the rest of the images, I wanted to show my favorite one first.  The shot I was trying to get by hiking up that trail.  So, there you have it.

Heading back down the trail, the sky was still cloudy, but the diffused light on the surroundings was really nice.  That's a great time to make some landscape photos.  Thanks for reading and following along.  Hope you have enjoyed to images as much as I did making them.   

Rocky Shore

Yaquina Head B&W