Travelogues
2019 Oregon Trip

Thursday, June 6

Today was supposed to be one of the high points of the trip. We were going to Crater Lake to shoot along the Rim Drive before shooting sunset at Watchman Overlook. But the highlight of the day was supposed to be shooting the Milky Way directly over Wizard Island starting at 1:00 a.m. We were going to shoot until about 3:00 and then drive to a motel just outside the park. There was only one "slight" problem. There was so much snow at Crater Lake that the Rim Road and the entrance from the north were both still closed, and they still didn't have an estimate on when it will open. That meant we had to settle for Plan B.

Toketee Falls

We only had one goal for today's Plan B: get good images of Toketee Falls. Toketee is one of my favorite waterfalls in the West. Last time we were there in 2008, I came home without any good images of the falls. It was a bright, sunny day, and there was more contrast than the film could handle between the shaded alcove and the waterfall in the full sun. Now, everything is digital, and we have a lot more tools to handle these conditions. We also had enough high cloud cover that we could time our shots to get bright sunshine that was filtered through the clouds. That produced relatively even light and cut out most of the harsh highlights.

We tried shooting along the Umpqua River on the way back to Roseburg, but the same clouds that helped us at Toketee Falls prevented us from getting any good shots along the Umpqua River. The sky was nearly completely overcast, and the lighting was drab. We saw the potential for great shots, but they wouldn't be today.