Heceta Head, Last Light

The internet has flattened photography in a specific way: by the time you arrive somewhere famous, you've already seen what every other competent photographer made of it. The sunset version. The blue hour version. The drone version. After a while you stop wanting to make those versions and you start wanting to make a version you haven't seen. For Heceta Head, that meant getting close. Really close — close enough that the lighthouse fills the vertical frame and you can see the cuts of the railing and the imperfect plaster of the tower wall and the green salal in the foreground that I had to choose deliberately to keep in the frame because they put you at a specific distance. The sun was setting behind the lighthouse. I wanted a sunburst through the lantern room, which meant I had to be at exactly the right angle — close to the cliff edge, lower than the lighthouse, with the spikes of my tripod dug into the slope and my body braced because the slope wasn't level enough to stand on without leaning. I used a remote trigger because I couldn't get a good footing. I was there for what felt like an hour and was probably forty-five minutes. When I saw the photograph on the back of the camera I knew that day.