We pulled into Sisters Rock yesterday, just north of Gold Beach and south of Port Orford. The fog was thick. Couldn’t see more than thirty feet. My cousin Loren was with me. We got out of the car and stood in the gray, looking for the trail down to the rocks. The air was heavy and wet. My jacket was soaked through in about five minutes. I could hear the surf but couldn’t see it. It sounded like traffic from far away.
The light kept changing. It would go sunny for a minute, then the fog moved back in. We had just finished exploring the rocks to the west when I set up the tripod and tried to bracket for the sky and the rocks, but I was losing both. I made a frame of the basalt reaching toward the shore, the surf breaking below. The wind kept knocking the tripod. I held it with one hand and fired with the other.
By evening the fog had settled in. No sky, no moon, no stars. Loren and I set up the tent in the damp and immediately broke a pole. We had already rethreaded the campstove to fit the propane tank. I sat in the half-dark working the valve with cold fingers while Loren held a headlamp steady. The fog moved in and out all night. I kept waking to the sound of it against the rainfly.
I wrote the first draft of this lying on my stomach inside the tent, a Bluetooth keyboard connected to my iPod touch. The screen was small. Later, when I hiked back to the car, I turned on the wifi hotspot and sent it over a thin 3G signal.
In the morning I opened the tailgate into a workspace. I ran an inverter off the car battery and powered the laptop through most of the afternoon. I edited photographs in the front seat with the door open, the ocean visible in patches through the mist. Lightroom, then Photoshop. Waiting for a file to render while the fog burned off.
That afternoon I edited the first frame in the car. I removed the dust spots, added contrast—too much—and cropped and straightened the horizon line. When I looked at it later on a real monitor, the blacks were clogged, the detail lost in the white foam. Too much blue. It had looked okay on the small screen.
I went back to the raw files and selected another frame. This one I reworked with less aggression. The color balanced closer to what I remembered: the wet basalt, the gray-green water, the fog still hanging in the upper corner of the frame.
The last version I converted to black and white. No split tone. Just the lines of the rocks against the surf.
We’re in Arcata next, or maybe the Trinity Alps, or the Lost Coast. The choice will be weather dependent.
