Heceta Head Lighthouse Scenic Viewpoint is one of the more iconic sites on the Oregon Coast. The bridge, beach, and lighthouse are all gorgeous. I’ve been here during every season, night and day. I’ll keep coming back, too, because it’s always different.
Photography Notes
Every time I visit the Heceta Head Lighthouse I always end up shooting the bridge. This time around I experimented with black and white contrast filters. With a monochrome sensor you can manipulate the contrast of a scene by using yellow, orange, red, green, and blue filters (or any other color you want) to brighten or darken the tone recorded a given color.
Add a blue filter and a pale blue bridge becomes bright and vibrant against a green background. Add a red filter and stop sights glow like a flashlight and green trees get much darker. It’s fun, and in the world of analog photography where each film has its own spectral response to different colors you have to experiment to see how intense is the effect of each color. It’s fun, and one more reason why working with a monochrome camera feels more like working with film than any other digital camera I’ve encountered, including the -D versions of the Leica M rangefinders. Those are the ones without LCD screens or any way to review the images on camera.
This particular image was shot with a yellow filter which had no visible effect on the bridge or deep green trees, but livened up the green-yellow and yellow areas quite a bit.
There is an insane amount of detail and no noticeable noise in this file. I’m not sure there’s a practical limit on how large this could be printed. I’m happy that it also reads well at a small size. Being able to read an image at both large and small size is one of my benchmarks of a good edit.