Primetime in the Palouse

I’m just back from leading a photo workshop in the Palouse country of southeast Washington state. I certainly wasn’t the only one leading a workshop or photo tour there, at the prime time for lush green fields of wheat, peas, and barley, but there’s plenty of room for everyone on Steptoe Butte and miles of farm roads to explore.

It was great to see friends Jack Graham and Bill Fortney on the Butte with their workshop, and to run into Jason Savage and his clients while photographing a classic red barn. Somehow I missed Andy Williams with Muench Workshops, Chip Phillips from PhotoCascadia and Photoshop guru Tim Grey with his group, but it’s great fun, and very interesting, to see what those folks are posting now on blogs and social media.

One of the locations that just about everyone visiting the Palouse goes to is the Dahmen Barn in Uniontown. This year, photographing the barn and the famous iron wheel fence proved to be a bit of a challenge for photographers visiting in June. The artists co-op that now owns the property tore down the old, very weathered, structure that was attached to the barn and replaced it with a new building that will provide better facilities for artists and events.

Many photographers were disappointed to see this when they arrived at the location because the new structure stands out like a sore thumb next to the classic Dahmen dairy barn.

I spoke with one of the members of the Board of Directors for Artisans at the Dahmen Barn. She assured me that the non-profit organization is well-aware of the issues for photographers and has plans to improve the situation in the very near future. The exterior wooden walls of the new structure, which do mimic the original, will soon be stained to a color very closely matching the old weathered wood. Furthermore, covers and other decorative embellishments will be added to disguise the new utility boxes, and there will be shutters and sliding doors to cover the new windows and doors.

I was very disappointed to hear from this Director that some photographers had actually yelled at her when they visited recently and discovered the changes. That is totally not okay, and totally unfair to a person representing a group of people dedicated to preserving this remarkable site. I too was certainly a bit annoyed to get there and find that I wouldn’t be able to make the photograph of the barn that I had planned on, but there is no excuse and absolutely no reason to be rude when you run into such circumstances.

So what can you do when you get somewhere and the view is really different from what you planned on, based on all the other photos you’ve seen of the location?  As Dewitt Jones so wisely says, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. Take it as an opportunity, and a challenge, to make the best of the situation and come up with something that works, and will give you an image different from all the other photos you’ve seen published and posted before. Great creative with your composition, and maybe with your image processing as well.

My solution was to try to use part of the wagon wheel fence to block the modern elements of the new structure, at the same time using some of the wheels to frame the classic old dairy barn. I also went with a retro black & white/monochrome treatment to try and minimize the recently torn up bare dirt in the yard in front of the barn.

For the above image, I experimented with some straight black and white conversions, using the Lightroom presets that Michael Frye provides in his excellent tutorial “Landscapes in Lightroom 5” (not at all outdated by the release of LR v6 and CC), and then experimented with various filters and presets in Silver Efex Pro and OnOne’s Perfect Effects. Each gave me some great interpretations. The one I liked the best for web display, as above, was achieved using Perfect Effects 9 with the Tarnished Bronze preset in the B&W module, which not only does the conversion from the full color RAW image, but also adds the border effects.

Another challenge, and opportunity, that all of us faced when visiting the Palouse last week was what to do when the skies were just plain and blue. The kind of conditions that visitors bureaus love to promote, but where serious photographers long for dramatic clouds.

One of the great things about photographing in the Palouse is that you can use just about any lens in your bag, from super wide to super telephoto. And when the skies are boring, it’s time to bring out the long telephoto and zoom lenses. My photo workshop clients were able to capture some great images using their 70-300mm, 70-200mm and 200-400mm lenses, zooming in on focal points of grain storage silos, red barns, and the beautiful patterns of wheat fields and undulating hills of the Palouse.

A great thing for photographers shooting the Palouse (as well as many other locations), is the new Dehaze tool in the just-released versions of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Give it a try in the Effects panel of Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. I see also some potential for using this tool to add apparent haze for an effect with some images.

On a bit of an aside, if you have my book Photographing Washington, note that in the reference to shooting the Palouse, I mention on page 285 a barn on the east side of Glendale Road. That barn collapsed sometime in the past couple of years. 

Did you get to the Palouse for the lush green fields this year?  If not, go for the golden and “amber waves of grain” around harvest time from mid-July to early August. And if that doesn’t fit your schedule this year, put this trip on your bucket list for a future date.

If you’re interested in visiting and photographing the Palouse in the future, email me, check my workshop schedule or check on this page for links to some of my other photographer friends leading photo workshops and tours in Washington.

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