Cannon Beach Oregon Coast Highway

What a lucky mistake. I thought that I reserved a spot at a campsite in Astoria, OR. As it turned out Cannon Beach RV Resort is 20 miles south of Astoria. I was upset at first but then I found out that one of the places that I wanted to photograph on this trip was just on the other side of US-101. It is Haystack Rock. The jutting rocks, long and deep beach was great for photography. I managed to get images at both high tide and low tide, bright light and low sunset light. In the past I have told about some of the challenges I faced trying to get the images that I wanted. Here it was a matter of taking images and changing my camera settings until I got the image that I liked best. I would take a picture and look at it on the LCD screen. This is called “chimping”. The term comes from a photographer taking a picture, looking at the screen and if the picture is really good the photographer gets excited and starts saying “OO-OO-OO” like a chimpanzee. I didn’t do that, but I was determining which picture that I liked best. I would set my ISO setting and take several pictures adjusting my shutter speed different on each picture. Then I would set the shutter speed and adjust my f-stop. It was fun taking pictures this way. Of course, there were a lot more images to filter through for processing. Another thing that I liked was that at low tide I could walk right up to Haystack Rock. There were a lot of tidepools around the rock. There were many sea stars (starfish) in the pools. The colors were purple, orange, red and some with multiple colors. I could also get up close the area where gulls and cormorants are nesting. Of course, you can’t get close enough to disturb the nests. I was able to get some good birds-in-flight images.