Reflections At Rooster Rock (on the Columbia River…)
Rooster Rock State Park, located about forty minutes east of Portland is a region I use often for my photography. The park is essentially a long stretch of beach that hugs the Columbia River, which is the major body of water that separates the states of Oregon and Washington. It is quite a majestic space, surrounded by mountains, marshlands, and an ever changing river tide that ensures the landscape is never quite the same place twice.
It also happens to be an official clothing optional space, a fact that makes life much easier for photographers like me.
Despite Rooster Rock’s clothing optional designation I still like to get there for photo sessions in the early morning hours. Not only is it nice to beat the crowds and not have to worry about random figures in the background of my photographs, but the light is also just stunning when the sun begins to just barely creep over the mountains to the east. During this time, the more shallow areas of the river turn into a mirror and it can be impossible to detect with the naked eye the difference between the sky and the wet earth below your feet.
It’s during this short window of time, typically about twenty minutes or so, that the photographs practically make themselves. I simply meter the scene once, load the camera with Ilford HP5, a film stock that is very forgiving to changing light, and just trip the shutter over and over again. I probably exposed about four rolls of film in the span twenty minutes with the simple instruction to my model Eva to just primarily “move around.”
The biggest technical challenge by far in situations like this is making sure I get my horizon lines straight across the frame. I was using my Hasselblad SWC hand held and an easy solution would have been to put the camera on a tripod and rely on a bubble level. But that would have also slowed me down and it was important to me to get as many shots in as possible before the sun rose too high in the sky. The extreme wide angle of the 38mm lens on the Hasselblad SWC means lots of space in the frame. Believe it or not, but I was only standing a few feet away from the model in these images.
Looking at my negative sheets after development and I would say I was successful with about fifty percent of my images. Not bad honestly…
Camera: Hasselblad SWC camera with 38mm f/4.5 lens.
Film: Ilford HP5 in medium format.
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