Let’s face it – electricity together with wires and poles are here to stay for a while. 🙂 So, what do you do when you see great light, great color, but electric pole and wires get in your way? Well, the only things to do is to make them part of a composition.
One advantage of taking a road trip instead of flying is being able to see and photograph things along the way. At least that’s the theory. Once I’m in driving mode, I’m in driving mode, I want to zap as fast as possible to my destination. I still can see things around but I don’t stop to photograph.
That was the case up to my last trip to Palouse. I’ve made it rule to stop at any point I find interesting along the way. And I did, even if it meant turning around and driving back. It meant turning off my driving mode and being more aware of landscapes around.
It paid off with this photo.
Couple more images of the same place – horizontal:
And vertical:
Sometimes you chase the light and sometimes you need to wait for it.
By the afternoon of the second day the sky started to clear and I started heading back home. I still wanted to stop by a few places on my way home. One of those places was a large canola field that I saw on my way to Colfax.
In the first day with no sunlight in the first day the canola field looked dull and uninspiring. But with the light and shadow spots moving across it I thought it could be interesting. With a sunlight on it the canola field was bright yellow. The kind of color my son loves because it is warm and happy.
I drove around the field looking for a composition. I could not quite anchor the composition around anything, because there was not anything in the field. And just as I almost gave up I saw and intricate play between light and shadow which shaped up the field into something that was interesting to photograph by itself.
Clouds were moving very fast. By the time I stopped the car, got out of the car, setup tripod, put a camera on tripod the cloud moved on and shadow that was shaping the field was gone.
Sometimes you chase the light and sometimes you need to wait for it (or, to be more accurate, in this case wait for a shadow). The next two hours I’ve spend waiting for another cloud to come in… and here is the photo I was waiting for:
After dreadful first day in Palouse the second day everything a landscape photographer could have dreamed of. The sky was filled with puffy clouds moving fast across the sky dragging spots of light across the land. All I had to do was watching those light spots highlight something interesting in the landscape.
I enjoy chasing light and shadow moving across the landscapes, its continuous change of scenery. It is like looking in kaleidoscope. There is an infinite amount of beauty in it and all you need to do is watch.
Here are two photos of the same place and same composition but different light. The first one is about the barn, since the light is on it: 
And the second one is about fields behind the barn, since they have light on them: 
Which one is better? Not sure. They are just different and I like them both.
Here is one more example. The white silo stands out of landscape with the light on it and a cloud shadow behind it: 
And here it blends with the landscape: 
Last weekend I made a short two day trip to the Palouse – an area in Eastern Washington famous for its rolling hills covered with patches of fields. It is very beautiful and photogenic place. Some call it American Toscana.
My first day of the trip in the Palouse was dreadful. Grey solid sky, no light, little color. Just as if it could not get any more discouraging, suddenly the rain started. It was pouring down heavily. Most people would stay home in that weather. Not me. I went on scouting around.
The rain stopped just as suddenly as it started. Heavy clouds and soft light were majestic.
I even caught a glimpse of warm pink glow in the sky from a light of the Sun settling for the night.
Just one small piece of advice: don’t drive dirt roads there when it is wet. The dirt is a fine grain clay that becomes extremely slippery when wet. You’ll lose any control over your car. I am talking about it from experience.
Recently I went with a fellow photographers to photograph rhododendrons which are common on eastern hills of Olympic mountains. We were hoping for fog to have a good separation of rhododendron bushes from trees in background.
There was fog but not where we needed it. The only option left was to use shallow depth of field. My fixed 50mm lens got second life. I had not used it for a while but it was most appropriate in that case since it had the widest aperture of all my lenses.
Rhododendron
The other options was to let it blend with with forest, make it part of it.
Spring Green
Did I mention there was fog but not where we needed it? Well, we ended up spending most of the time photographing that fog that was somewhere else:
Fog Over Lowlands
Fog Over Puget Sound
California poppies can be found in Western Washington only along roads. I’ve spotted one of such places along one of freeways while driving my son to gymnastics. The hills was burning orange covered with poppies.
The next morning I woke up a little bit earlier to get to that hill and photograph poppies before work. I parked the car at the nearest parking lot next to a store and walked to that hill. The poppies were as good as the day before – an island of the Nature beauty in the middle of a city.
So, there I was, lying on a ground photographing poppies with cars passing by at a high speed. Here are a few photos I took:
Sometime I find a photograph just by accident. Like this one.
I was photographing flowers in a forest. The flowers were across a small creek that I could not cross. So, I was photographing with my hands stretched out, composing by looking at a live view on a screen on the back of my camera.
As my hands got tired I let my camera hang on a strap. That’s when I saw reflections down in the stream on the screen. I was immediately captivated by interweaving mesh of branches and interplay of continuously changing reflections in a moving water.
As I wrote in my previous post (Good Night, Ladybug) there is a hill close to my house that has various wild flowers blooming every year. Here are a couple more photos that I took at that hill recently.
I love the place where I live. There is a hillside not far from my house that surprises every year with a grand display of various wild flowers.
It changes every year. The first year I moved here it was covered with California poppies (well, I’m not in California, I’m in Washington, nevertheless we have occasional California poppies here). The next year it was covered with lupines. The year after that it was red poppies. Then chamomiles. This year it is a mix of various flowers.
I don’t know what’s the secret of this hill but I certainly appreciate the opportunity for close up and macro photography that the nature gives me.
Here is a photo I took at that hill recently just after dusk at twilight. The ladybug settled in chamomile flower for the night and the flower was slowly closing up.
vitali prokopenko | fine art 