Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Stumps arise in the ghost forest with Proposal Rock in the distance, at Neskowin beach on the northern Oregon coast.

Sunlight dappled through the morning mist and glanced off the ancient stumps, which rose from the sand like obelisks, mysterious and beautiful.



The "ghost forest" at Neskowin is the remains of an 2,000-year-old stand of Sitka spruce, once buried by an earthquake, but revealed today whenever the tide is especially low. I wrote a story about the phenomenon when I visited this past summer, but now I'm pulling back the curtain to share a little bit about my photography.



Before we get it into, a quick note: This is a new feature I'm trying out, for those of you interested in learning more about the processes that go into nature photography. Please feel free to let me know if it's useful, if it's not, and what you might like to see done differently. You can leave a comment here or email me at jhale@oregonian.com.



Now, on to the ghost forest, one of the most hauntingly beautiful sights I've ever seen.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

PLANNING

The ghost forest had been on my radar for more than a year. After first reading about it online, I stuck the idea in my back pocket, waiting for the next super low tide to hit the coast. At the beginning of 2018, I looked through tide tables for the year and saw it: a tide of -2.07 feet on a Saturday morning in mid-July.



As the day approached, I planned a trip that would get me close to Neskowin the night before. I stayed in Lincoln City that night and hit U.S. 101 just after dawn, making the 20-minute drive to Neskowin and arriving right at low tide. A low-hanging mist enshrouded the beach, looking downright ghostly. My heart began to race with excitement.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

THE SHOOT

Photo shoots in nature can be fickle. A lot of times I struggle, coming away with only a few good shots, but that morning the ghost forest gave gold. The mist not only softened the sunlight, but cast a beautiful gradient on the shoreline and Proposal Rock, which rose magnificently just beyond the field of exposed stumps. The morning sky was radiant blue, the sand a deep brown tinged with gold.



I was overwhelmed when I first arrived. There were so many ways to compose the stumps. Do I go wide and document the whole scene? Or do I focus on individual stumps? Should I compose it with the ocean in the background? Proposal Rock? The shoreline? Beach walkers showed up to explore the scene, offering new opportunities and challenges for composition.



Feeling the stress start to rise, I decided to let my playful inner child take over, exploring the ghost forest with innocent curiosity and composing the photos as creatively as I pleased.



As always, I shot with my Canon 5D Mark III and 24-105 mm lens. I pushed my aperture to f/22 and set the ISO at 1250, giving me a good shutter speed of 1/800 of a second. That gave me a deep focus for the landscape, and a quick shutter that allowed me to shoot handheld without a tripod (unlike my fellow photographer in the picture above).



Before I start shooting (and sometimes before I even arrive) I try to figure out where the light will be coming from, so I have some idea of which elements will be illuminated and which will be in shadow. That morning, the sun was rising in the northeast, meaning I could shoot the fully-lit stumps looking southwest, or catch them in silhouette looking east.



After some experimentation, I found that my favorite position was shooting straight north. Most of the stumps were dark with light painting one side – a dramatic look – and cast long shadows on the sand. I also had an incredible background with Proposal Rock in the distance, adding some great depth to the pictures.

Once I had my fill of that angle, I wandered around the fascinating forms of the ancient trunks, experimenting with all kinds of compositions. There were so many beautiful elements to the scene – rippling water on rippling sand, sea stars clinging to gnarled roots, mirrored reflections in the water – that I could have spent the whole day shooting. I took nearly 400 photos over 80 minutes and pulled myself away as the tide rolled back in.

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

EDITING

My editing is usually very minimal, as photojournalism ethics demand, but since the lighting was particularly phenomenal on this shoot, the photos didn't need much work anyway. The image above is what one of the photos looked like straight out of the camera. Other than it being a little dark (I always underexpose my photos intentionally) it's pretty nice on its own.



I use Photoshop to edit, but the tools I use can also be found in most basic photo editing software and apps. After straightening and cropping the photo just a touch, I adjusted the levels, curves, saturation, brightness and contrast (see those steps in the images below) and then used the clone stamp tool to clean up some sensor dust. In some of the other photos I used the shadows/highlights tool to bring out the stump shadows and dim the bright sunlight.

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First I adjusted the levels, dragging the left and right points even with the edges of the histogram.

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Using the curves tool, I barely pull the line up in the center of the upper right quarter, pulling it down on the bottom left, making a very slight S-shaped curve.

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The colors are already pretty strong, but I add just a little bit of saturation to make them pop.

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Finally, I use the brightness/contrast tool and add a little of both.

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In the end, I wound up with nearly 30 edited photos of the Neskowin ghost forest, a great haul from an absolutely stunning shoot. If you want to shoot it for yourself, keep an eye on the tide tables for a large minus tide. The lower the tide, the more stumps you'll be able to see – and the more great photos you'll get.



--Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB



SEE MORE PHOTOS BELOW

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

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