Tim Grey’s Blog

We all know that weather predictions can be—shall we say—a little less than accurate. In fact, I’m sure we’ve all heard (or made) jokes about how inaccurate weather predictions seem to be, with many theories about the arbitrary ways meteorologists must go about predicting the weather.

I’m wrapped up with the third full day of photography as part of a workshop in the Palouse region of eastern Washington, and we’ve been tracking the weather obsessively using various applications on our iPhones.

This morning we were supposed to wake up to partly cloudy skies, but instead I arose to brilliant sun with not a cloud in the sky. That turned out perfectly, because it offered great conditions to photograph a crop duster spraying the wheat fields near Pullman, Washington.

The rest of the day was predicted to be sunny as well, which we were excited about because that was ideal for the view from the top of Steptoe Butte. But when we drove away from the restaurant after a nice dinner in Colfax, Washington, we were disappointed to see clouds forming to the west.

As I mentioned, we were obsessively checking the weather with various applications on our iPhones, and the hour-by-hour forecast was getting updated every hour, with the forecast changing wildly each hour. We have seen this a few times during the workshop here, so I’m not sure if the Palouse is a region where it is particularly difficult to forecast the weather, or if this is just one of those weeks where the weather is especially unpredictable.

As it turned out, the real weather in the morning was much better than we anticipated based on our photographic plans, but the afternoon was much worse than forecast. Naturally we made the best of the conditions that were given to us, and turned out some photos we were all very happy with in the process.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 9:29 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.