Hi Tim,
I've spent the first 18 and the last 16 years of my life on the Oregon Coast.
I don't know how long it's been since David's been to Astoria, but in the last five years it has gone upscale and yuppified; I'd no longer call it an interesting and authentic port city, much less gritty-- one factor in my decision to leave Astoria and move inland next week. Five or ten years ago you could buy one of those Victorians for $100,000 or so; now they're more likely to command half a million to a million. New restaurants spring up every month, and more condos being built along the river (and even the new condos and townhouses--all pretending to look like Victorian-era dwellings-- are half a million dollars)-- well, you get the idea, and you can tell how I feel about it. Just another once-interesting and once-real place has been turned into a theme park for the moneyed to pretend they're living in an authentic fishing port, but without all those disagreeable fish smells and working class people that used to inhabit the place. Most of the new buildings sport a faux-cannery look, to keep the sense of "authenticity", but there's nothing authentic about a brand new multimillion-dollar hotel or brewpub tricked up to look like a 1900-era fish cannery.
September and October are the months of the year when you can pretty much count on warm sunny weather at the coast; to me it's the least interesting time to photograph. I like to photograph in storms, myself, and prefer the normal grey-green color of the ocean under an overcast sky. When it turns blue, it looks abnormal to me, and I put my camera away til it gets over that.
I know of some good trees, if you like trees, and since I have your book and like your work, I'll tell you privately where my favorites are if you're interested. But don't bother with the "tallest Sitka Spruce in the --US?--world?" off US 26; it's a very sick and damaged tree and should be put out of its misery.
The Tillamook Forest is an interesting place; it's a 50-mile square area that was burned in a series of huge forest fires in the 30s and 40s, and was replanted by a massive effort by all the schoolchildren in the state of Oregon in the 50s. Now those trees are approaching maturity and it looks like a forest again, though when I was a kid all you could see for miles was mud and dead snags and elk skeletons. They'll start logging there again soon, but for the moment, there are lots of trees there.
kt
