Another Drought-turned-Vacation

You can never have enough beach vacations, especially in unusually dry years like this! The drought that’s only recently ended around where I live has again made for suboptimal picture shooting conditions near where I live, but it’s given me good luck timing my trips to Seaside this year.

I’m actually posting this a couple weeks after the fact. Further keeping me out of now-scarce daylight is I’ve fallen quite ill with a respiratory virus (supposedly RSV). What actually got me writing this time was trying to respond in kind to an old college friend I’m trying to help get started in the photography hobby. Trying to write in that prose wound up changing to the sort of prose I post here. My old Rebel T7 has been passed along and I already like what I see from its output in other hands. I don’t have the rights to my friend’s pictures, but I still have pictures from during and around my recent trip that I would like to share.

Since I’m helping someone get started with a kit lens, it’s a good opportunity to show off a good shot of a plant from a little before this trip. Here’s a tree leaf (I believe it’s a ginkgo) with a yellowing pattern that complements how little is kept in focus. Looking at the EXIF, this is surprisingly at f/5.6; putting this effect in reach of almost any kit lens.

The trip did actually start out with less than perfect weather, but that adds to the sights when you’re not here too often…

…Though a conundrum appears: The pelicans seem to only readily make themselves known under the veil of bad weather, yet I don’t get the best pictures of them in these conditions with lighter gear.

Some fog during the night can set things off with a little effort, though!

One of my favorite shots of this trip is actually someone’s planter and railing giving curb appeal on the Promenade. I normally don’t go out of my way to take pictures like this (since I’ve been chased off for this before in less-touristy towns), but this one was too good not to share.

Well, what do I do with all this sunlight in the sand when I don’t want to waste it? I run RC vehicles in it. Paddle tires make short work of sand on rigs that are heavy enough to bite into the sand, though big-lug tires that are trending these days often have enough bite to still do their job. (This is in fact how my Maxx’s stock Sledgehammer tires in the front still do okay even with the heavier overspecialized Dumont tires in the rear.) Sand guarantees soft landings, but sand also guarantees enough will work into your mechanisms to cause bindings. This time I got away with just a stripped servo plastic gear set after almost a week of heavy use (I’ve somehow gone almost a year with the stock wimpy 2090 servo), but down the line just about anything metallic will likely bind or corrode from this use if I’m not careful.

I took a buggy out here as well and it did perform reasonably with the battery weight shifted forward. With this shift the front rib tires get enough mass to shovel turns, but even oversized rear paddles would occasionally lack the mass to overcome soft spots in the sand. With the battery in the more orthodox rearward position I get nearly infinite rear traction but have zero steering above about 3MPH. (I should also disclaim this isn’t really a picture, but a framegrab from a video. There’s a truly great picture of it up close aided from a steep section of the Necanicum delta at low tide. However, it’s not my picture; but my father’s.)

I think I found a method for getting splash pictures that doesn’t burn me out: Just wait a couple seconds after impact and take a single shot. Trying to high-drive (in other words, rapid fire) a splash just ends up in a lot of wasted storage space and headache trying to find the best moment from the many available, and this burnt me out hard last year around this time. If I were a pro I would still do well to rapid-fire the whole thing, but as a hobbyist there’s more peace of mind just finding a method that gets a single good moment out.

This vista from Short Sands, not too far south of Seaside; is my favorite vista from this trip, but there’s some trickery afoot! This is a wide angle (24mmEq), but only a tiny patch of this area was above-water at this point. The shapes of the rock formations and genuinely tall cliff in the distance make this look like a far wider and more diverse vista than it actually is.