Photo Tales: Milky Way over Ruby Beach Campfire
Almost midnight…clouds clearing…tide coming in…Milky Way getting brighter…tripod starting to sink into the wet sand. Would the Milky Way line up with the sea stack before the Pacific Ocean tide washed me off Ruby Beach?
Pacific Northwest Trip
In 2015, we took a glorious six-week summer trip to the Pacific Northwest. We visited Vancouver Island, Mount Rainier, Portland and the Columbia River Valley, and Northern Cascades and Olympic National Parks, most for the first time. Olympic is perhaps the most diverse national park in the United States.
In the interior mountain section, there are peaks with glaciers, and from Hurricane Ridge, you can see across the Juan de Fuco Strait to Vancouver Island.
Lower in elevation, there is an incredible temperate rainforest, with jungle as lush as those I have seen in the rainforests of Puerto Rico or the cloud forests of Costa Rica.
The Pacific coast of the Olympic Peninsula boasts an incredible array of tidal pools, sea stacks, and forested cliffs, which for miles is relatively undeveloped, thanks to the national park and the Makeh Indian Reservation. This coast makes for excellent night photography, and is where I captured my favorite night shot to date: Milky Way over Ruby Beach Campfire.
Olympic Photo Workshop
For the Olympic part of the trip, I was participating in a photography workshop led by Mark Bowie and Joe Lefevre for the Adirondack Photography Institute. We spent a fantastic week shooting around the Olympic Peninsula,. We spent four nights in Port Angeles, visiting waterfalls, lakes and mountaintops on the North side of the park, including an entire night on the top of Hurricane ridge, where we shot sunset, the night sky, and sunrise that morning. Then we moved on to Forks, WA (yes, THAT for Forks, for Twilight fans), for three days and nights exploring the Pacific coast. Joe and Mark had timed the workshop to coincide with a new moon, with the idea of shooting at night as often as the weather would allow, to capture the Milky Way along the coast. We spent our days in Forks exploring the rainforests, and nights along the coast shooting at Second Beach, Ruby Beach, and Rialto Beach.
Pacific Coast
All three nights, the skies were more conducive to sunsets than astrophotography. Our first night, we explored the sea stacks along Second Beach.
It looked like the sunset would be a dud, with dense clouds blocking the sun during golden hour. I had set up a shot on my tripod with a composition that I really liked, but had gotten bored waiting for the clouds to part. I wandered down the beach with my second camera body to see what my fellow photographers were capturing. Just after sunset, there was a brief burst of color in the sky, so I rushed quickly back to my tripod and captured this shot. It was a good lesson in preparation and patience.
Ruby Beach
The next night we visited Ruby Beach, and it was one of the best sunsets I have ever photographed. Just enough clouds to silhouette the sea stacks, excellent golden hour light, and zero wind, so there were fantastic reflections in a tidal pool created by a stream. I took hundreds of shots that night, but my favorites were with a fantastic root system of a large tree floating back and forth in the pool in front of this great sea stack with two openings. Once again, the clouds did not break up after sunset, so we left without much in the way of night shots.
The third night of the workshop was at Rialto Beach, and once again fantastic compositions abounded, but the clouds we really thick, and the best I could do was capture a few black and white images.
The workshop was fantastic, and I highly recommend ADKPI for workshops (if you aren’t taking one of mine, of course), but I still hadn’t quite gotten the night shot I wanted.
An Extra Night
Niki and I had reserved a 4th night at the motel in Forks, figuring that once the workshop was done, we could spend an extra day visiting some of the same spots together, and relaxing before heading down the coast to Oregon. As it turned out, the weather that night called for clearing, so I decided to go back to Ruby Beach one more time, this time by myself.
It should be obvious, but aside from the weather conditions, the tide is the most important factor when shooting on the Pacific Coast of Washington. It just happened that low tide was right at sunset that night. (June 19th, so sunset was around 9pm) That meant that leading up to sunset the beach expanded, exposing sand and rocks that were underwater at the same time two nights before. Experimenting with capturing the tidal flow, I explored new sections of the beach. I even capturing a bit of video, but because the clouds were sparse, my sunset shots were unremarkable.
I played with silhouettes of the rock formations against the sliver of the moon left in the sky after the sun set. Once it set by maybe 10 or 10:30pm, the stars came out to play. Around this time, I turned to the South, and noticed two things. First, someone has lit a campfire along the beach, not too far from where I had shot the Sea Stack sunset photo two nights before. Second, the Milly Way was dimly starting to appear, and it seemed that in an hour or so, it might line up nicely with that same sea stack. So, with my new Sigma 24mm f/1.4 Art lens attached to my Canon 5D Mark iii, both bought with this night in mind, I composed my shot, and waited.
Milky Way over Ruby Beach Campfire
Soon, a bunch of people, with various colored headlamps and flashlights, ran onto the beach near the campfire. I was maybe 100 yards up the beach, so I couldn’t tell what was going on, but the flashlights we causing havoc with my perfectly crafted scene. Was my friend (in my mind it was a friend, since she had created a lovely warm source of light for the rocks that would otherwise be dark), just the first of a huge party of drunken revelers? Meanwhile, I started to hear the waters lap closer, as the tide started to come in, and boy, the stars were really starting to pop!
Almost midnight…clouds clearing…tide coming in…Milky Way getting brighter…tripod starting to sink into the wet sand. Would the Milky Way line up with the sea stack before the Pacific Ocean tide washed me off Ruby Beach?…
Well, the tide did wash over my feet a couple of times before the flashlights went away, but that meant that the stars were reflecting in the wet sand. No, I couldn’t see quite that many stars in the Milky Way. A really fast lens (like my f/1.4), on a long exposure, is able to capture more stars than can be seen with the human eye. I also didn’t notice until later that I also captured two shooting stars! Sometimes it pays to go back to the same spot!
Please let me know what you think of my Photo Tales series of posts. If you have a favorite photo of mine and would like to know how I captured it, feel free to contact me, and perhaps I can include it in a future post!
