The Oregon Coast Trip That Made Me Change Careers to Photography
- Ryan Oswald
- Nov 24
- 8 min read
Some places are beautiful.
The Oregon Coast rearranged my life.
I didn’t come out here with a grand plan. I came out burned out from seventy to eighty hour weeks in real estate, grabbed my camera and drove to the southern Oregon Coast and the redwoods because they’d been sitting high on my bucket list for years.
Three weeks later I was driving home feeling like a different person.
At some point on that long drive, completely stress free for the first time in years, I asked myself a question you’re not really supposed to ask out loud:
“If money wasn’t a real thing, what would I actually want to do with my life?”
The answer was painfully simple.
If I could take my camera into places like this every day, I definitely wouldn’t hate my life.
That thought didn’t go away. That trip to Oregon and the redwoods is the reason I walked away from the desk job and built my life around photography.
This is why I keep going back.
This is where everything started to click for me & my photography went to the next level.
Two Worlds in One Stretch of Coastline
What makes this part of the world so special is how close two completely different worlds sit next to each other.
On one side you have:
A jagged coastline with sea stacks that look like they were designed for wide-angle lenses
Tide pools full of starfish and sea anemones
A dark horizon over the Pacific that makes the Milky Way feel clean and simple
On the other side, just inland, you have:
Some of the tallest and oldest forests on the continent
Redwoods that don’t feel like “trees” so much as living architecture
Fog that rolls in at very specific times and places and turns the forest into a maze of light rays, soft shadows and sometimes even fog bows
You can spend a night under the stars on the coast, sleep a little, then be standing in a glowing cathedral of fog and redwoods the next morning.
That contrast is why I think Oregon is one of the best places you can come to learn landscape and night photography at the same time.
One Unforgettable Night and Morning
There’s one stretch of time that pretty much sums up what Oregon gave me. The night that lives rent free in my head started on the beach and ended in the trees.
I’d already been on the coast for weeks, crawling into every cove and viewpoint I could find. One night the bioluminescence showed up. The waves started glowing electric blue when they broke, and every step along the wet sand left a trail of light.
I chased it from spot to spot all night. No sleep, just moving, shooting, watching the surf flash in the dark.
By the time the glow faded, it was almost morning. Conditions looked good for fog in the redwoods. I was wrecked and ready to crawl into bed, but something in me said, “You’re already up—might as well see if it’s there.”
So I drove.
Past Crescent City, up the hill toward the forest, the fog started rolling in. Thick, heavy, exactly what I’d been hoping to see.
Whatever exhaustion I’d been feeling just vanished. I pulled over, grabbed my gear, and pretty much jogged into the trees.
Time stopped.
For the next three hours I ran around inside that forest like a little kid, chasing beams of light as they cut through the fog and branches. Every time I turned, the shapes shifted and I saw a new frame. I forgot that I hadn’t slept. I forgot about real estate, email—everything.
The second the fog burned off and the light went flat, it was like someone flipped the switch back. I could barely keep my eyes open. I hiked out, finally grabbed a few hours of sleep, then went back out to do it all over again.
That cycle is what Oregon feels like to me. The place keeps rewarding you for staying curious and staying awake a little longer than you meant to.
One sleepless stretch between the coast and the redwoods. Two very different classrooms in less than twelve hours.
What I Started to Notice Here
The first trip was mostly instinct. I was chasing what felt good.
The more time I spent on the Oregon Coast and in the redwoods, the more I realized how much this place was teaching me without making a big deal about it.
It didn’t feel like “learning.” It just felt like slowly seeing more.
Sea Stacks That Turn the Coast into a Skyline
The longer I shot along this stretch of Oregon, the more I realized the waves are just the rhythm section. The real melody is the sea stacks.
Those “haystacks” are what give the coast structure. They’re the anchors you build everything else around.
I started to notice how different each spot felt depending on where those rocks sat in the frame:
Sometimes they line up cleanly along the horizon, like a skyline made by the ocean.
Sometimes one stack stands alone and becomes the hero, with everything else playing backup.
Sometimes a smaller rock close to me frames a much larger stack in the distance and suddenly there’s depth I didn’t see at first.
Low tide reveals reflective sand that turns the stacks into silhouettes with their own reflections. Higher tide pushes the water right up to their bases so they feel massive and immovable. The same rock can feel calm one evening and wild the next, just from a small change in water level and sky.
Oregon is where I stopped treating those sea stacks as “background scenery” and started treating them like characters. Once that clicked, every beach felt like a new cast to work with, not just another stretch of coast.
A Forest That Refused to Stay Background
The redwoods were a different kind of challenge.
At first it was just chaos. Trunks everywhere, branches slicing through the frame, ferns in all directions, beams of light that felt impossible to control.
My biggest mistake was trying to show everything at once. It always felt like the forest was winning and the photograph was losing.
The turning point for me came when I added a human figure to one of the scenes.
As soon as I put a person into the frame, the scale made sense. I had a clear hero. The trees stepped into a supporting role instead of fighting the subject. I suddenly knew what I could cut out of the frame and what actually needed to stay.
From there, I started to break the forest down into smaller pieces:
One tree catching light instead of ten competing
Ferns in the foreground doing a job, not just filling space
Paths and openings leading into the scene instead of random gaps
Light rays as ingredients, not the entire meal
The redwoods taught me to be picky. To treat every branch and fern as either part of the story or a distraction.
You can practice that in other forests. Here it just happens faster, because the stakes feel higher and the light shows every mistake you make.
Oregon Coast Skies That Reward You for Staying Up Late
Night photography used to feel like a magic trick other people knew.
The Oregon Coast changed that because the setup is so clean: dark ocean to the west, strong foreground shapes, and—in the right season—the Milky Way lining up over the sea stacks.
Here’s what I realized over time:
Once you understand how the Milky Way moves through the sky, you can plan when it will sit where you want it relative to the coastline.
You don’t need a crazy camera—just a reasonably fast wide lens and a sturdy tripod.
Most of the fear around shooting at night comes from not knowing what to set first.
On this coast I started building a simple checklist for myself. I still use it.
Once I worked through that a few nights in a row, the Milky Way stopped feeling intimidating. It became another part of the day.
If you are new to photographing the Milky Way, start with our Milky Way camera settings guide.
When Oregon Ignores Your Plan
If you spend any time here, you find out pretty quickly that Oregon doesn’t care about your plan.
The very first workshop I ever ran on this coast taught me that lesson hard. Every night a heavy marine layer rolled in and blocked the stars. On paper, the “Milky Way nights” were ruined.
It forced us to lean all the way into what we actually had.
Instead of fighting for a sky that wasn’t there, we chased mood. We worked with cloud texture. We framed sea stacks against soft, diffused light. We spent more time in the redwoods letting the fog dictate what scenes made sense.
On the last night, after the workshop technically ended, the forecast finally gave us a clear sky. Almost everyone was able to stay. We went back out, tired but hopeful, and finally got that clean Milky Way over the coast.
That week changed how I plan here.
Now I watch the weather further up the coastline and I’m willing to move if that’s what it takes. I keep backup images and lessons ready in case the sky doesn’t cooperate. Most of all, I treat the mood that’s already present as the main story, not a problem I need to overcome.
Oregon is really good at teaching you how to adapt instead of forcing a vision that doesn’t fit the day.
Why I Keep Coming Back to the Oregon Coast With a Camera
Oregon was the place that cracked something open in me.
It took me from a life where I measured everything in hours worked and deals closed to a life where I think in terms of light, weather windows, and quiet stretches of coast.
I keep going back because this small corner of the world lets you practice almost everything that matters in landscape and night photography in a very short amount of time.
You learn to pay attention to how the land is shaped, not just what the sky is doing.
You learn to tame a chaotic forest without losing its character.
You learn that mood isn’t a problem to fix—it’s the whole point.
You learn that the sky is not out of reach once you understand how it moves.
Whether you come out here on your own or end up tagging along on a trip someday, my honest hope is simple.
I hope you get one of those nights on the beach where you lose track of time watching waves under the stars. I hope you get one of those mornings in the redwoods where the fog rolls in thick and you forget how tired you are because the light is just that good.
And I hope, on the long drive home, you catch yourself wondering what else might be possible if you gave yourself more days like that.
Days like this are why I left the desk job behind.
If you want to experience this coastline in person, check out our Oregon Coast photography workshops.
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