Toying with 'Light Orbs' on the Oregon Coast

Published 03/29/26 at 12:45 a.m.
By Andre' GW Hagestedt, Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff

(Waldport, Oregon) – It's – well, it's a long, long time ago – probably a good decade. I don't even remember when now. I'm wandering beaches at night as usual, camera gear in hand, trying to photograph the star and ocean scene. In this case, I'm goofing around Pacific City, shooting Haystack Rock with wacky stuff in the background and the occasional muffled buzz of a car behind me in the parking lot. Headlights sometimes fire off past me, lighting up things in the foreground, maybe even the surf. All photos Andre' Hagestedt / Oregon Coast Beach Connection

The shooting is unpredictable. Each long exposure will catch something different. It's like a Brian Eno approach to photos – or maybe Robert Fripp's Frippertronics. Happenstance rules the results.

And I love it.

You always hope you're going to learn something new with this Oregon Coast Beach Connection gig, and nighttime photos definitely present that opportunity. Though not always. In this case, I was a bit stunned.

Something truly random happens. A guy and his young son wander down the ramp and then they stand in the sand, with Dad clearly setting up camera gear of some kind. All of a sudden, the kid starts twirling these multi-colored lights around wildly, and dad is taking photos of it. I don't know what the hell this is, but it's cool. They're right in front of where I was shooting so I include them, and lo and behold – I figure it out by looking at the photos on screen. The kid is making what looks like giant balls of yarn with the lights.

I wind up asking them about it and the father tells me it's called “light orbs,” and I almost need no other explanation. He must've gotten the perfect forms from where he was, but I got the oddball, disjointed shots. 'Tis cool, however. I was like the behind-the-scenes guy. I handed him my biz card (yeah we still had them in those days) and told him if he wanted these I'd send'em.

I became a little obsessed with light orbs for awhile. That trip, I tried it myself at Lincoln City the next night or so. I had to set up the camera and then walk in front of it as it did the long exposure by itself. This was a whole rigmarole all its own: I had to concentrate on creating a perfect circle, and do so without leaving a stray trail end to the thing. That means timing: you had to start the circular motion and then switch on the light in your hand, and then switch it off in the right spot, so you don't have a random start or end point sticking out beyond the shape.

I couldn't get it right. Instead, I got kooky, random blobs that looked like a kid who couldn't color between the lines. So I improvised. I just started walking around the pier at Taft, moving the blue light in different motions, knowing vaguely what shapes it may create.

Indeed, all this hearkened back to one of my favorite album covers of all time: Synergy's Games from the late '70s. Synergy is just the working name keyboardist Larry Fast had for this one-man rig. The light shapes across the bridge on his album looked like some alien traipsing through the city. I've never forgotten it. I believe (though not sure) he did this album cover himself, using techniques purely in-camera on 35 mm film. It inspired me to experiment with this technique myself in the '80s, so this orb thing came fairly naturally.

You can't do this in Photoshop and still attain that very singular look. And now with AI, who knows? But there are detailed subtleties that can't be done any other way than this technique.

The Taft experiments were somewhere between Fast's album cover and the light orbs of that family. Getting the orbs right would still take practice. What ev's.

I think I got bored of experimenting with this and wanted to move on. I now knew how to make fake alien energy creatures if I wanted. But as luck would have it, I got forced into one more experiment.

Fourth of July of whatever year this was, and I had just shot Yachats' firework show. On the way back to Newport, traffic got hideous. I got bored and a tad road-ragey. So I pulled over at Lost Creek near Waldport and took a bunch of night shots.

To vent my frustration, I took one long exposure by hitting my face with a bit of light so I would show up as a blurry ghost-like thing. Then, using the light pen, I tried painting a certain word in the air close to the word “fun” (but slightly different letters). It didn't work properly, and instead I got the word “fun” out of it. I laughed, and it turned out serendipitous. Then I played with the light orbs some more, sometimes by just walking around, so it would leave that surreal, glowing trail. Against the cliff I tried the light orb technique – and I almost got it. The Lost Creek of the Central Oregon Coast

Doing this at Lost Creek created some trippy light reflections in the sand

By the time I got done, traffic had cleared long ago. I got lost in this for more than an hour. To boot, I had some interesting shots unlike others I'd done in the past. And well, as you can see....I had some... fun. See the video of this shoot

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