<p>Sand pattern at Beard's Cove. Photographed with 4x5" black and white film, using a Toyo Technical Camera.</p>

The sea was cresting at 12 feet, a leftover feast of a storm from the night before. My friend Dwight Caswell called. He wanted to hunt down a photo opportunity, what the Ninja Turtle Raphael called a Kodak moment.

My morning schedule was light, and I was game. I thought of Raphael, that namesake for the turtle. Raphael Sanzio da Urbino was a remarkable 15th-century Italian painter during the Renaissance, a painter drawn to light, color and form long before the advent of the camera. He was one of the first painters to master perspective, a feat later simplified by the camera. Raphael added personal expression. That, of course, is the challenge of any artist, the challenge that Caswell faces every time he lugs his equipment onto the beaches or shoreline of our beloved homeland.

Dwight had his camera, as well as a bag of photographic tricks. We didnt have a lot of time, or, more precisely, a lot of time to corner the perfect morning light. Professional photographers insist that light at dawn or dusk is the best and at times, the only time for perfect outdoor images. Dwight carries a backpack filled with modern camera equipment, but there isnt much he hasnt tried. Whatever he chooses to use, he applies with skill, dexterity and patience. Often, the patience means not shooting anything at all. Often it means waiting for hours only to shoot a single frame.

We drove to Beards Hollow (a mile west of Ilwaco, Wash.), maneuvered the pickup truck into a predestinated parking space at the east end of the park, and began the most pleasant of hikes on a paved path (wheelchair accessible) that would lead us to the fishing rocks that highlight the south end of the Long Beach Peninsula. Along the way, geese were mating, woodpeckers (yellow-bellied sapsuckers) pecking, and the still saltwater marsh bustling with waterfowl and avian activities. The sun had risen in delightful splendor, golden rays creeping over the tall igneous cliffs that form a dramatic background to the more dramatic beach. Surging combers broke into that hollow, displaying white foamy heads and all the power that tall, wonderstruck combers can provide, particularly when the spectator is standing and viewing this saltwater phenomenon from the vista of a safe haven. In the early years of the last century before the building of the North Jetty and the advent of more severe undertows and rip tides folks waded and swam here. Historical photos show parties of swimmers clothed in full-body cotton swimsuits, which seem both charming and warm. How much actual swimming they did eludes me. But they did pose well, smiling all the while, dashing back and forth into the ocean as the tide ebbed and flooded onto the sandy 28-mile beach. Dashing with their arms held high and giggling with freedom and gaiety. That style of activity seems as distant as that century. Nowadays, people either fish those rocks for sea perch or stand and gaze adoringly at the crashing waves. Many snap their modern pocket-sized cameras and imagine every image as a masterpiece. From time to time, a few climb the pyramid of artistic merit and arrive in the winning circle.

Dwight got out his camera and went to work. Oddly, he turned from the ocean and began to concentrate on the fishing rocks themselves, those now above the flood tide. I am looking for patterns formed in the sand as the tide recedes. Im always looking for patterns. Dwight was using a 4×5 Toyo, a state-of-the-art carbon fiber camera with a 210-millimeter Schneider lens. There are so many pictures taken of the waves and the Pacific horizon that I only shoot the ocean when the conditions are perfect.

Better than two hours after dawn, they werent. Dwight spent another hour preparing and then shooting but one image. He steadied the camera with a tripod. Essential, he declares, for the clearest of shots. When I asked him if such patience was common, he claimed that the most shots he ever took in one day with a large-format camera was 12. Everything I shoot, he added, is already prepared in my head.

My head was swimming with delight as the combers crashed and parried, as they swept around and over the gunmetal fishing rocks. As the sea spray jetted upward in sky surges that painted the landscape in white swatches, blue sky crept through. Gulls flew over. A solitary eagle. The cacophony was magical, those sounds of breaking waves, sea birds and the tug of tide as it drew back into the ocean, only to charge again. I took shots with my small magical point-and-shoot camera. Dwight looked at them later, and pronounced kindly, Those have potential. Perhaps, I thought, but Ill relinquish images of this day to the professional.