Heceta Lighthouse

Heceta Lighthouse at sunset

Last Summer Lee Ann, Anika, and I spent a couple of nights near Florence on the Oregon coast. All pictures from that trip are in my flickr album. We had rented a house on Heceta Beach just north of the town which gave us quick access to several interesting sites in this part of Oregon. One of them is the Heceta Lighthouse. It is nicely visible from a viewpoint along highway 101.

Heceta Lighthouse as seen from highway 101

While browsing souvenir shops and art galleries in Florence some of the best pictures are at sunset from right behind the lighthouse, like the picture at the top of this post. The problem is that the site and the park below it close at sunset. This seems to be common in Oregon and is a real problem for evening and night photography.
At Heceta Lighthouse there is, literally, a way around that, if you have good shoes and a flashlight. It is called Hobbit Trail. It starts North of the lighthouse on 101, climbs over a hill, and 1.5 miles later reaches the lighthouse. The other fork of the trail leads down to Hobbit beach. It is a beautiful trail, but a bit of work, especially if you are in a rush to catch the sunset and then back in the dark using flashlights. But, well worth it. Doing this hike and photographing the lighthouse with Anika was my favored activity on this trip.

Hobbit Beach from the fork of the trail that leads to Heceta lighthouse

Taking the lighthouse picture is tricky. The horizon is very bright with the setting sun, the lighthouse light is on, but turning, which is an issue with long exposures, and the foreground is already dark. I had to use photomatix, the Linux version of course, to create the HDR image. I tried exposure blending and luminosity masks, but was not able to create a picture that was as good as the HDR. The white walls of the buildings and the lens and lantern make it difficult.
The HDR image is pretty good. Better than many Heceta Lighthouse pictures on the Internet, but not as good as some of them. I need to learn more about luminosity masks.

Thor's Well

I visited Florence in the 90s and have been wanting to go back for a while. On one of those Top-Ten Places to Visit websites I saw a picture of Thor's Well. It was captioned as the drain of the Pacific Ocean, a must see site in the world, right here in Oregon, and on the way to Florence. Clearly, I had to see and photograph this.
My picture is nowhere near as dramatic as most of the pictures out there. To get a really good picture  you need high tide, clear weather, near sunset, and ideally the moon setting in the Northeast. Needless to say, getting all these things lined up properly on the Oregon coast requires time and patience. An additional difficulty is that the good spots to take this shot are dangerous - people have been washed out into the ocean or fallen into the hole - and prone to soak expensive camera equipment with saltwater. So, Thor's Well was a little disappointing for us this time. We'll try again.

The Milky Way and Jupiter from the back porch of our vacation rental near Florence

Many spots along the Oregon coast are quite dark and offer beautiful views of the night sky when the weather is nice. I took the above picture of the Milky Way from the back porch of the house we had rented. To the left is some light pollution from houses nearby and Florence further South. My camera was on an equatorial mount but it was not properly aligned with the North star; I'm still learning how to do that. I took a bunch of pictures and tried to stack them, but none were as good as the single picture above. More photography skills to learn.
This trip was in August. One reason it took me so long to write about it was that many of the pictures took quite a bit of time processing and many of my attempts did not work out as I had hoped. Nevertheless, this was a fun trip and I like the pictures I brought back home. Look at all of them in my flickr album.