Photography | Ben Coffman Photography

Freezing cold takes – combing the archives during social…

Like many of you reading this, I’ve spent the vast majority of the past three months at home. For the first two months I didn’t go into grocery stores. I didn’t go into home improvement stores. I didn’t go for a drive. I barely took any new photos, and when I did, I didn’t leave my yard. I just did what I could at home with what I had. This included making weird, incomplete meals, like burritos without wraps or spaghetti with only the sauce and meatballs. And working in the yard, of course.

My indoor time was spent reading online articles ranging from the absurdly optimistic (“Clinical trials advancing quickly! We’ll have a vaccine very, very soon!”) to outright depressing (“We’re all going to die and nothing will be the same.”)

But the silver lining in all this is the amount of time I’ve had to go through my unpublished photos and review them. And I cannot express enough how big of a deal this has been (and will be) for me.

Over the past five years or so the pace of my little photography career had increased rapidly. Workshops and private lessons both in Oregon and throughout the West meant that I was spending most of my time helping clients acquire and post-process photos and doing very, very little of my own acquisition and post-processing. I struggled to post-process my own work when I was away from home.

These unpublished photos were an albatross around my neck. I had a hard time staying motivated creatively. And it’s very difficult to return to a place like Arches National Park for another round of night-sky photos when I haven’t even fully found out what I got the previous time.

My photographic process has always been about refining and improvement, either via my vision, my in-field techniques, my post-processing techniques, or, in some cases, my gear. I felt like I had skipped this crucial step over the past few years, and I owed a lot of that to an inability to mine my archives of its full potential.

I’m not finished with my backlog yet. But I already feel much better about it and am on track to finish it.

Here’s a sampling of night-sky photos I’ve finally had the opportunity to work on and publish. It only took the external forces of a global pandemic to make it happen.

Crumbling rocks in the Utah desert, beneath a Milky Way sky filled with green-yellow-orange airglow. As of the time of publication, this photo (taken two years before), has about 8,500 views on Flickr!

The Milky Way arches over Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa and its famous sailing stones. Multi-row panoramas of the night sky can be somewhat difficult and time-consuming to put together, so of course they’re some of the last photos that I get around to processing.

The Milky Way arches over the summit of Mauna Kea, with the Keck Observatory being closest (in the left of the frame). Glow from Kiluea’s 2018 eruption can be seen along the horizon at the middle-right of frame.

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Bay of Naples panorama

Last year, during a trip to Italy with my family, we spent a few days at a bed-and-breakfast on the side of Mt Vesuvius, up-mountain from the coastal town of Herculaneum. When we first arrived in our tiny rental car, entering through a large motorized swinging gate after being buzzed in, an elderly Italian woman who spoke no English greeted us. She lived onsite, on the upper floor of their impressive tri-level square house, with its acre of land and an impressive garden. The middle and lower floor (where we stayed) were dedicated to lodgers. The house was a gigantic white box with a square white roof, black railings, and a circular turret facing the west that offered commanding views of Mt Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Naples, and the Bay of Naples.

On our first night there, I entreated the woman who owned the house to allow me to take some photos from the roof. She spoke almost no English, and my Italian was limited to around 20 words, exactly zero of which had anything to do with photography, but I waved my camera and pointed and bastardized some Spanish words until I got my point across. She stopped her gardening, wiped her hands on her housecoat, and led me up a creaky wooden staircase on the interior of the house. At the time, I didn’t realize this would require going through her third floor—I assumed the roof could be reached via an exterior tightly-wound circular staircase. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

As we got closer to the top of the stairs, I could hear a baritone voice belting out something in Italian. We walked through her front door and she shuffled ahead quickly, attempting to close the gaping bathroom door before I got an eyeful of her husband (or lover?), who was doing his best Pavarotti impression in the shower. Regret filled me to the bursting point. I did my best “Oh hey, what’s that on the ceiling?” impression, and she quickly waved me through the kitchen and out onto a balcony overlooking the garden, where I found the circular staircase leading to the roof.

So the next day, during an approaching storm, I was more than reluctant to ask her if I could go back up on her roof. Instead, outside of the gate of their property and a few hundred feet down a gravelly street was a large, unfinished concrete structure—three floors! All I had to do was jump across a ditch, avoid various construction supplies laying around, and climb its skeleton structure to the second floor, which was conveniently sheltered from both rain and lightning (I thought, anyway).

Watching the storm roll in over the bay around sunset was surreal. I spent over an hour on my concrete perch, watching the day turn to twilight with the glow of orange-yellow city lights flickering to life, and finally to night. So much seemed to be happening: The sun setting, with its residual glow, cruise ships entering and leaving the bay, and an endless stream of car traffic. Lightning crashed around me the entire time. Eventually I left and ran to get my wife and kids, despite it being past their bedtime. The show was too good to miss.

Herculaneum, the Bay of Naples, and Naples, as seen from the second floor of an unfinished house on the side of Mt Vesuvius. (Click for full size.)

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An ode to disappointment (or RIP, little quad copter)

The Pacific Northwest has more capes than Comic-Con, each of them with exotic and descriptive names. But my favoritely (not a word) named cape (a headland or a promontory of large size extending into a body of water, usually the sea, in case you wanted to know the definition) has to be Cape Disappointment, an area on the southwest Washington coast that doesn’t disappoint when it comes to beautiful views of lighthouses, but has been known to have terrible weather. And sometimes it even eats quad copters.

Last week’s weather forecast for the coast looked incredible–almost too perfect. Clear skies and low humidity promised an amazing view of the night sky. I learned a long time ago that there’s no such thing as a slam dunk when it comes to night photography in Oregon or Washington, but every forecast I saw said that it couldn’t get any more clear.

On my way, a thick marine layer met me in Seaside and left me briefly concerned, enough that I almost turned around after over an hour of driving. However, the skies cleared and my spirits soared as I neared Astoria. I clicked through my mental checklist of photos that I was going to take at Cape Disappointment that night while crossing the Astoria-Megler bridge into Washington. Nothing could stop me. However, after arriving at the North Head parking lot at Cape Disappointment, I was met with a surprisingly hard wind that only got worse whens I made my way through a grove of trees to an open bluff where the lighthouse sits.

I set up my gear, but several blurry photos informed me that my normally sturdy tripod couldn’t hold steady during the 40-mph gusts, even with my 20-some pound backpack hanging from it as ballast. My grand plans were being blown away. I realized that a lot of the compositions I wanted simply would not be available to me because I was too exposed.

I had to find cover from the wind, so I sought out different compositions and eventually found a couple spots that offered some protection, at least to the point where my tripod was no longer quaking. I took my sunset photos, and then recomposed for twilight and waited.

Shortly afterward, a couple of guys with a quad copter showed up. The sun was below the horizon, and the sky was darkening quickly. I watched them trot by the path in front of me over to the lighthouse, eager to prepare their drone (I’m assuming there was a camera of some kind on board) for what would’ve been a beautiful set of aerial photos. The sun’s remaining light was breathtaking, and the lighthouse itself was beautifully lit. It was a perfect evening. Except for the wind.

After a quick setup, the quad copter took off, reaching about 50 feet in altitude. Then it began to list like a boat taking on water as the winds quickly pushed it away from North Head, until it was hanging 100 foot above the ocean. The guy flying the drone had no way to put it down without crashing it into the sea, so he kept it aloft until it was over Deadman’s Hollow and Long Beach and was probably over half a mile away. As it got dark, I lost site of the drone. The guys left soon thereafter–presumably to look for their missing equipment–with noticeably different body language from when they had arrived.

I waited around for the stars to come out, and then I grabbed a few more photos, but I was still having a lot of problems with the wind. A couple hours after sunset the winds still hadn’t died down. My eyes were dry and irritated, my face felt chapped, and my equipment and I were covered in blown sea spray. I decided to pack up and leave. I turned my back to the wind and let it propel me down the path back to my car. As I walked the dark trail, far down below on Long Beach I saw a couple of flashlights scanning the sands. They still hadn’t found their drone.

The North Head lighthouse glows at twilight, Cape Disappointment, Washington. Prints available here.

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Rainier blows up

My six-year-old son and I both agreed that this was a “top-10 sunset.” I know that a six-year-old’s opinion doesn’t usually hold much weight, but my son’s seen a few sunsets in his day. This one exploded for nearly 45 minutes, bathing us in various shades of orange-red light.

At home, he routinely interrupts me from staring at my computer monitor so that he can excitedly drag me to our west-facing window and point out some pink-purple clouds. “Our favorite sunset colors” is a topic of conversation that has regularly come up in the past few years. Last summer we spent nearly three weeks on the road, staying up late, waking up early, checking out over half a dozen national parks, and talking a lot about photography. This summer we didn’t make it out quite so much.

Every once in a great while I feel a tinge of envy when I see posts from young, single photographers who have the opportunity to run off at a moment’s notice. While they chase sunsets, I’m often chasing kids around a playground. While they breezily travel to far-flung locales on a whim, I’m intricately planning out how I can get away for a night.

And every once in a while I find myself in the right place for a take-your-breath-away, the-sky-is-on-fire sunset. Long ago I thought it would be a good idea to carry a camera to capture those moments so that others could appreciate them, later. But it’s also nice to have a small person at my side who stops poking at the dirt with his stick to yell, without any pretense, “this is incredible,” not because he’s been coached to do such a thing, or because he feels that the exclamation is expected of him, but because he’s thrilled to be there in the moment, seeing an incredible sunset. With me.

Mt Rainier bathes in soft light at sunset, as the White River runs below. Click to view full-size photo. Prints available here.

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A night with an old friend

"Equilibrium," a whitebark pine hangs on the rim of Crater Lake by its roots, while the Milky Way spins overhead. — “Equilibrium,” a whitebark pine hangs on the rim of Crater Lake by its roots, while the Milky Way spins overhead; prints available here.

I took a physical geography class years ago, and the main thing I took away from it was that wind and water are the Earth’s primary erosive forces. And Crater Lake’s not lacking for either of them.

Crater Lake in summertime is very different than Crater Lake during any other season, mostly because the place is buried in snow from early fall through late spring (if not longer). To a certain extent, that snowy winter coat protects some of the native trees and plants. But the water resulting from 10 feet of snow melting can move a lot of soil around. Once the trees are unburied they’re subjected to Crater Lake’s infamous wind. When the wind gusts at over 30 mph, the top layer of that volcanic soil takes flight, and you can feel its sting against your shins (if you happen to be out there in shorts) or even your arms and face. In these harsh conditions, figuring out the reason why many of the rim’s whitebark pines have become denuded of their bark over time doesn’t take a lot of imagination.

Unfortunately, man’s presence further accelerates the process. We move soil (both inadvertently and on purpose), trample plants that would better secure the soil to the ground, and some of us will even climb on some of these ancient trees in order to get a good selfie. The phrase “loved to death” springs to mind, but I would never begrudge anyone the opportunity to experience Crater Lake’s beauty in the same ways that I have (although I’ve never climbed any trees in the park).

At some future point, this spot may be closed to the public so that restoration can take place. At some other future point, this tree will likely fall into the crater, a (hopefully) natural act that was to some degree partially hastened by my many trips to photograph the tree. And at some long future point, if diseases like blister rust and insects like the mountain pine beetle win out, whitebark pines on the rim of the lake will cease to exist at all.

These seem like slow-moving or outright invisible processes, but I’m always surprised at the changes I see in these trees year over year: an extra twist in the bark, a more-exposed root, a fracture in an exposed root that was likely caused by a human’s weight. It’s these little changes that motivate me to go check in with these old trees, my old friends, to see how they’re holding up. And in the process I take another photo and make another memory.

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Before dawn’s first light at Crater Lake

Getting There

This photo, like all of my images that I took this night, was from the Crater Lake’s west rim. I and my friends Jack (of Jack Crocker photography–check him out) and Robyn Clipfell (of Clipfell Photography–check her out as well) hefted heavy packs and snowshoed a little over 3 miles from the Rim Village to a site just a bit south of The Watchman, the giant peak on Crater Lake’s west side.

Getting the Shot

This photo was taken at 4:56 am, just 12 minutes after I had taken the final photograph for my panorama, and it’s a fantastic example of how important dark skies are in capturing the Milky Way. Cameras and lenses? Both very important. But the MOST important aspect of lotsa-stars-Milky-Way-photography is a super-dark sky.

I knew from checking the Internet that the sun was going to rise at about 6:30, and I knew from experience that the sky begins to lighten in the east about 2 hours before the sun is visible. So when I started shooting my panorama of Crater Lake at about 4:17, I wanted to make sure that I got my east-facing shots first, since that area of the sky would begin to lighten first, thus drowning out the Milky Way. Luckily, I just barely got my panorama photos taken in time. (Yes, it actually took me a long, freezing half hour to take those photos.)

Twelve minutes later I took this photo, the last of my “night” photos. The stars disappeared pretty rapidly after that.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d also captured the comet PANSTARRS in my photo. An eagle-eyed reader on my facebook page alerted me to this fact. In the images below, the arrow points to a very, very small PANSTARRS, complete with tail.