Tim Grey’s Blog

Part of any photo excursion is dealing with environmental conditions as they change. The Palouse region of eastern Washington state is known as an arid region, getting an average of just under 20 inches of rain each year. That compares to an average of about 37 inches per year for Seattle. And yet, we’re getting some rain here in the Palouse on the first full day of a photography workshop I’m leading along with photographer Wolfgang Kaehler.

So, with overcast skies we loaded up to head out to the “Art Barn” in Uniontown, Washington. Part of the draw is a wheel fence that was built around the property over the course of 30 years. With flat lighting we decided this was a good option to warm up our photography for the week. The hope was that by afternoon things would clear up. They didn’t.

We worked the area for several hours, capturing many images in the cold and damp weather. Certainly not the conditions I would have asked for, but when you do photography outdoors you often have to work with what you’re given. Since we’re here for a full week we can return to specific locations when the conditions are ideal, but while we’re waiting for the weather to improve we’ll still find opportunities to make images.

Of course, we also spent the afternoon doing image critiques and talking about image storage and backup, since the conditions had only deteriorated and photography didn’t seem like a good priority at the time. But in many cases I find you can be surprised at the great images you can get when you thought perhaps it wasn’t even worth taking your camera out of the bag.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Weather, Workshops, Photography. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.