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.
Light – the basic principal of photography. That’s why so many photographs made during day when we have a lot of sunlight. But photographing at night in moonlight is just as much fun for me (or maybe even more fun).
Night photography is full of surprises. I only have a general idea of a composition since I cannot see as much at night as in sunlight. Then experimenting begins. First, I need to find the right exposure, then find an actually interesting composition. Each attempt lasts for minutes – that how long exposure needs to be.
Then the fun with artificial lights begins. Adding flashes or flashlights to lit up some elements of landscape. There is no limit for creativity, except time.
On my last trip to the Palouse I spent about 5 hours photographing one night, mostly to get this photo. Each exposure was 5 minutes. Once I found exposure I noticed streaks of clouds moving in the sky. I thought it would be cool to align them with the tree, so they coming from behind the tree. Took me about 10 attempts to find that spot. Another hour is gone. Then I started experimenting with two flashlights lighting up the crown of the tree or creating light spots in the field. Eventually I stopped at this image, right around 1am.
I’ve dreamt of seeing Palouse in white for several years but every winter when it was snowing in Palouse there was a snow storm at mountain summits that I would need to cross to get to Palouse and those summits would be closed. Finally, this year I caught a forecast of snow in Palouse while it was not snowing at all on the west coast of the state of Washington. This meant that I would have an opportunity to get there.
There was only one day on the forecast between snow and rain with possibility of sunshine. That’s the day I wanted to be there.
I woke up at 2am, checked driving conditions, put clothe on, re-checked equipment and took off for a long drive to Palouse. Four and a half hours later I was standing on Steptoe Butte looking at Palouse in white. I was there just in time for a gorgeous sunrise. It was like a Christmas dream come true.
since it loves us
and forgives everything,
why was it abandoned forever?
Lyubov Sirota
What an exciting moment start of a new project. That is of cause when you know you start it. This project has begun before I knew it…
I’ve been traveling a lot to an area in the Eastern Washington called Palouse. This area offers really beautiful landscapes with rolling hills and patches of fields. Some call it American Toscana. While looking for beautiful landscapes to photograph I was driving thru small towns in this area and sometimes stopping, looking around and photographing of cause. Over time collection of these photographs grew and I was not sure why I was taking those photograph and what to do with them.
Riding from Seattle (where I live) to Palouse is a bliss – 4 hour drive across Washington state from West to East at about 70 miles per hour. There are quite a few towns you pass by on the way there. I used to drive thru them without ever stopping. Except once I travelled with a fellow photographer who wanted to get a coffee and we stopped in Ellensburg. Ellensburg turned out to be an interesting town, its historic center had a lot of old buildings. While walking its streets I realized that this is what attracted me in all other towns. The historic centers of many towns in Central and Eastern Washington look very old. And it is not like they are preserved for a history. They look abandoned like orphan children, they want some attention but don’t get it. While passing thru some of them I would find their streets empty almost like ghost towns. Some towns are slowly disappearing. In others people for some reason have moved away from their historic centers.
Once I noticed this pattern I begun to stop in every town on my way and capture those old town centers in their vanishing act. And thus the project “Olde Town, WA” was born.
Antiques
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
I’ve been to Palouse many times but still have not found a good place to photograph at sunrise or sunset except the Steptoe Butte. The last trip was not exception. One day we scouted pretty large area trying to find a good composition and end-up with missing sunset. There was a great sky but we could not find a great composition. I ended up taking pretty simple photographs like this:
Sunset in Palouse
Other days I was experimenting with new angles from Steptoe Butte, trying to include some strong foreground into a picture:
Sunset with a Rock
vitali prokopenko | fine art 