Roadtrip Images

Thor’s Well on the Oregon Coast is quite the rock formation. It looks like a hole in the ocean at first glance.

Thor’s well is located along the rocky coastline near Yachats, OR. You can access it via the Cook’s Chasm pullout on Highway 101. It looks like a hole in the ocean at high tide when the incoming waves cause the area around the well to fill up with water. In actuality, it’s a sea cave where the waves fill up the well from below and the hole on top is like a large blow hole. Water floods out and over the sides of the well and then drains back in.

The well is out on the rocks from the established viewpoint with appropriate warnings about the waves at high tide. If you’re careful and don’t get on the wrong side of the Well you can venture out pretty close to get a nice camera angle into the well and still stay dry. If the wave is strong enough the water shoots up from the well with a lot of force. If you’re on the wrong side of the Well, you’re gonna get wet. We watched several people make this mistake.

There are several features here besides Thor’s Well. There is also the Spouting Horn as well as Cook’s Chasm itself which is an inlet off the ocean that narrows to a point and the ocean waves crash up the chasm during high tide. It makes for a pretty good show. The Spouting Horn is another sea cave that shoots up sea spray through a blow hole during those same high tide waves.

To shoot a scene like this there are a couple of considerations. First is keeping your lens dry, especially if the wind is blowing, which is like, always. I kept a cleaning cloth over the lens when I wasn’t shooting to minimize the amount of salt spray hitting the lens. Even with this you’ll need to wipe down the lens from time to time with a micro fiber. Second, I think the well looks best when the water is draining back into it so you have to time the waves. A remote shutter release helps immensely for this. To get that silky smooth flowing water look in a still image you need a longer shutter speed. Somewhere between 1/4 and a 1/2 second seemed best to my eye. To accomplish this during the day I needed to add a 4 stop neutral density (ND) filter. With shutter speeds that slow you also need a tripod to maintain sharp images.

I used my 24-70mm zoom and I ended up at 32mm for this shot.  On a crop sensor camera that would be around 21mm. I placed the well at the lower right third point in the composition. I did some exposures with the well centered on the lower third line but didn’t like them as well. After everything was set up it was just a matter of waiting for the right waves to come in. We arrived at about an hour after high tide and stayed for a couple hours. The shots when the tide was higher were better.

I was hoping for some more color in the sky for this shot but sunset occurred well after high tide and the wave action just wouldn’t be the same. The sky was pretty overcast so we probably wouldn’t have gotten much anyway. If you want to shoot this, consult the tide tables and the sunset times to determine when it’s optimal for those conditions to line up.

The Oregon Coast is very dramatic and has some unique photogenic features like Thor’s Well, Haystack Rock, Seal Rock and many others. The seaside towns are pretty nice to explore as well especially in the off season when the crowds are gone. It’s also quite the whale watching destination although we were probably there at the wrong time for that. Depoe Bay seems like where the action is if that’s your interest.

We are slowly making our way north for the start of our trek to Alaska. As of the middle of April it’s still a bit early to cross into Canada and the Rockies. We plan to spend a few weeks in the Canadian Rockies before getting on the Alaska Highway for the long drive north. The Pacific Northwest seemed like a good place to explore while we wait for things to warm up a bit in Canada.

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Nikon D850 with Nikkor 24-70mm at 32mm. f/14 at 1/5 of a second. ISO 64