Haystack Rock

Author's Comments

The rock is famous for a reason. There is no use pretending otherwise, and there is no use trying to find an angle that has not been worked over by a thousand photographers before you. What I have learned, after enough trips down to Cannon Beach in enough weather, is that the photograph is not really about the rock. It is about what the wet sand does in the last twenty minutes before the sun goes down, when the tide has pulled back far enough to leave a mirror across the beach and the basalt goes black against a sky that can do almost anything. I have watched that sky do everything from soft pink to a violent orange that felt almost embarrassing to witness. February gave me the best storm light I have ever seen here, low cloud breaking just at the horizon, the rock backlit for maybe ninety seconds before it closed up again. June gave me puffins, small and fast and difficult, but worth the long lens and the patience. Sunrise is the secret that is not really a secret. The light is similar, the crowd is a tenth of the size, and the rock takes on a cooler quality that I find more honest than the warm spectacle of evening. Walk out at low tide, far enough that the reflection runs unbroken in the foreground, and shoot wide. Then put the wide lens away and look at the tide pools. Anemones, starfish, the strange green of sea grass against black rock. The detail photographs are the ones I keep going back to in my archive. They are the ones nobody else seems to make.

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