Oregon Photo Tour/Ken Rockwell Homage - 2012

The first order of business was watching the Transit of Venus. I passed out solar glasses for everyone, and most of us photographed the event, too, with the help of special filters provided by one of our participants.

We certainly encountered our fair share of overcast and at times rainy weather on our trip. Although the skies were cloudy when we all arrived in Portland, they cleared in time for the Transit of Venus. Luckily, one of our participants brought along some special filters he shared with the group that allowed us to view and photograph this rare celestial event. The two other dark spots, below Venus, are sunspots.

We spent a pleasant time, after dinner, walking along the west bank of the Willamette River. A telephoto both compressed and brought the bridges close together.

This young women, in downtown Portland, didn't mind posing for me a bit. Of course, I had to first ask her permission (and her friends), something not easy to do for many photographers; it was something we practiced on this trip.

One of our first stops was unplanned: a grove of cottonwoods off Highway 30. It was impossible not to try to photograph the sense of light and color and depth.

Although there were lots of planned stops for documentary/postcard shots, much of the trip also included serendipitous encounters, like this one.

We came upon a strangely-colored pond a little before returning to the main highway.

I photographed lower Multnomah Falls, in the fabulous Columbia River Gorge, from beneath the guard rail, not once, not twice, but three times in the same image.

Note the lower fall is viewed, upside down and reversed, inside the drop of water that's hanging off the rail. For that matter, you can see the fall a third time, in its reflection off the black-painted bottom of the rail.

On our last morning, we traveled from Portland into the vast Columbia River Gorge, where we photographed a couple of waterfalls, including the most famous, Multnomah. We equipped John with a red jacket and sent him up to the old bridge, where he turned loose his inner self.

Reflections, we learned, are everywhere.

We spent a few nights at the lovely Inn at Otter Crest, a few miles north of the town of Newport. Below the Inn, we explored a vast area of tide pools, filled with sea life.

The wind was gusting at 40 miles per hour. This was the worst weather we faced, yet it was weather which seemed appropriate for the subject, a steel-hulled sailing ship that went aground in 1906, as it headed up the Oregon coast toward the Columbia River.

Soft light from overcast skies illuminated Nancy as she stood in a doorway.

Ft. Stevens was designed during the Civil War to defend the region around the mouth of the Columbia River. The fort was operational until the conclusion of World War II.

The old structures of the fort – a series concrete rooms, walkways, lookouts, and gun emplacements – seemed at first glance hardly worth photographing. Yet we found, once we made our way across a soggy stretch of grass, that the old Fort, exhibited an Nancy was a good sport to pose for several of us in doorway with a colorful background.

Just south of the town of Florence, we explored a portion of the vast Oregon dunes.

A dairy cow examined my camera as I photographed it, not far from the Tillamook cheese factory. In fact, an entire herd of cows crowded forward, held back from us only by the fence around their pasture. I've had cows check me out before, from safe distances. This one eventually stuck it's nose against my camera lens!

A few minutes before, I was at the wheel of the lead van, and I drove right by the cows in their beautiful green pasture. The sun had just come out after a few minutes of hard rain, and I decided to turn around to check out the cows. I'm glad I did. I photographed with just my wide angle lens and I think this is the best shot of a cow I've made.

Ask nicely and often enough we're rewarded with portraits of people we may not know, and want to photograph. Such was the case with the young woman at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, in the city of Newport. (Having come from the City of Angels photojournalism workshop
the week before, I'd had a lot of practice approaching strangers.)

We came around a bend to discover a favorite jumping off point for paragliders. They rode the wind seemingly where they wanted, turning back and forth along the sun-drenched coast.

All the wonderful Cascade volcanos were on view on my flight home, from Mt. Hood to Mt. Lassen, in Northern California. One mountain was large enough to show well in my camera's viewfinder, mighty Mount Shasta, its snow-covered slopes reflecting the dying light of the sun at the end of a long day.

Here's our group of 11.