I’ve been wanting to go to the beach to see if I could still catch some of the Fall shorebird migration, so when I read a forecast saying that Ocean Shores wasn’t getting the smoke Tacoma was getting from Eastern Washington, I decided that we should try to get out of the house. We soon found out that it wasn’t going to be that easy to escape the fog.
When we got to Ocean Shores there was a little less smoke than there was in Tacoma when we left, but it was hard to tell what was fog and what was smoke. This shot of a sailboat out in the harbor is pretty close to the actual conditions.
The closer the subject, the better the shot, as this Brown Pelican flew by less than 100 yards away from us.
This Sanderling, on the other hand, was so close that the smoke/fog didn’t make much difference and the shot could easily be adjusted to compensate for the lack of light in Lightroom.
The smoke was so dense in Westport that Leslie wouldn’t let me get out of the car since the air was labeled extremely hazardous. As it turned out, by early afternoon the wind had shifted from the East to the Southwest and Westport was getting the smoke from fires in California and Oregon instead of from Eastern Washington fires.
Still, after a two-hour drive, I wasn’t ready to give up and head back home. The best shots of the day were the shots of the Brown Pelicans in Tokeland, but there was so little light that all of the shots were underdeveloped and slightly fuzzy,
even after adjusting them in Lightroom and Photoshop.
Modern cameras can do some marvelous things, particularly when paired with good software, but nothing can replace the magic of sunlight. These might have been fabulous shots with good light, but they will be deleted after this post.