I caught a pretty excellent sunset recently in Oregon!

Man, I love Oregon. It's gorgeous. Have you been? If not, you should plan to go, unless you hate Nature or have a thing against amazing coastlines and fabulous light. Then I guess stay home, but otherwise get yourself out to Oregon STAT. What a place!

As I wrote here before, I have been on a Western-US road trip with the family for a while now. We left Austin back in late June, and about the time this post goes live on Monday, Aug 17 (I wrote this about 10 days ago and scheduled the post to go live today, since I knew I would be on the road), we will be back in Texas and getting close to home. It's been an amazing 7 weeks on the road. We've all enjoyed ourselves immensely.

And I hope to write up a full summary of the trip later to share here. In the meantime, on to that sunset I was referring to above...

Hug Point is a small state park on the Oregon coast just south of Cannon Beach. At first glance, it looks like a lot of the other coastal parks there - a beach and a few sea stacks in the surf. But if you explore a little around the northern end (and the tide is low enough), you can actually walk onto a completely separate section of beach where you will find some sea caves and a little waterfall coming out of the woods and down onto the beach.

It's pretty stellar, and well worth a visit.

We spent a few weeks in the area, so I visited Hug Point on several occasions. I had been once before and loved it, so when we planned this trip I made a point to get here a few times in hopes of capturing a nice sunset.

I got one.

The funny thing was that we were just out walking along the beach, hanging with the dog and just relaxing, and all I had was just the camera and a single lens (no tripod, no other equipment with me). It was one of those times that you just can't tell what's going to happen with the light, so you pack light and hope it works out.

I figured it was going to just stay overcast, but then the sun really started to make itself known, and there I was, smiling and firing away handheld. Thankfully it all worked out. While I prefer to have the steadiness of a tripod, I'm not above just taking the shots when the scene presents itself. Heck, it will never be the same again, right?