Noon

Noon with clear sky is like a dead season for landscape photographers. The reason is simple – at noon when the sun is high there are almost no shadows and without shadows everything looks flat. Shadows is one of the ways to add perception of the third dimension in landscape photographs.

This is why many photographers who I know (including me) prefer to take a nap during day. We wake up very early before sunrise; photograph at sunrise and during early morning while the sun is low; sleep thru the noon; and then again photograph during evening, sunset and maybe shortly after.

On my last trip to Palouse I had another project in mind besides landscapes (I’ll be writing about that project later). And for that project noon was just fine. So I stayed up. This allowed me to photograph some good landscapes too. There was an interesting weather pattern I observed. At around 12pm clouds would show up and by 2pm they would be gone. Fellow photographers I traveled with would take noon nap around 11am because sky was clear and boring. They would wake up after 3pm when the sky was clear again. Their perception of the trip was that they were unlucky with weather.

I could not stop photographing thru midday on the other hand. Clouds were adding drama to landscape and light and shadow spots were moving over the hills changing landscape. My most landscapes last trip were photographed during midday.

 Light and Shadow