Loose in the Palouse: Panorama

Sometimes, in a photography workshop, you need to get an early start. Like, really early. Early enough to travel to and arrive at a pre-scouted viewpoint well before dawn, so you can catch the sunrise and morning light that comes with it.

In my case, this ended up meaning, “guess I’m not going to sleep at all tonight.”

The plan was to meet up in the hotel parking lot at 4:30 AM. Nearly the whole group rallied up for it – one doesn’t travel across the country and spend a bunch of money on a workshop to sleep through opportunities.

I’m not a morning person. Normally, at 4:30 AM I’m dead to the world, and if I remembered my dreams I’d probably be dreaming of another solid three hours of snoozing. But on this night, even at 3 AM my eyeballs were still all “boing” from the day before, and the old grey cells had yet to shut down. No point in trying to sleep just for a lousy hour.

Must have been that extra beer I had with dinner, on top of absorbing all the adventure and conversation so far.

So, at an ungodly hour, any light sleepers in neighboring rooms were probably wondering why someone was taking a shower in the middle of the night. And once they crept nearly back to sleep, wondering why some heavily laden clown would clomp down the hall well before the sun was even teasing the eastern horizon.

All for an outside chance for a nice sunrise.

If you recall the last post, the weather wasn’t the greatest the day before – overcast and rain were the themes that drew us to Palouse Falls instead of looking for nicely shaded hills. And while the forecast called for clearing, who knew when that might happen, and what the view would be from Steptoe Butte.

The View from Steptoe Butte

Fog. Not just in the little grey cells. Once we met in the parking lot, it was clear that it wasn’t clear, even in the pre-dawn darkness. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, and we all piled into the van with hopes of kicking butte.

The drive up in the darkness and fog, climbing the spiraling curves of Steptoe Butte wasn’t a sight to behold, unless you enjoy near blind turns with a steep drop on one side. Let’s just say I’m glad it wasn’t me behind the wheel. But once we neared our target we noticed, here and there, amongst enough fog to make a cloud bank jealous, an occasional break in the cloud cover of the slowly dawning day. Still, no sunrise drama.

To make the best of it, most of us tried shooting a time-lapse of the clouds. I had only limited success and didn’t figure out why until a few days later. Oh well, guess that’s the point of a workshop, to try stuff you wouldn’t typically do and learn from mistakes. I can’t blame the lack of sleep. It was just a quirk in my camera I didn’t know about.

A less than exciting sunrise. Being there is half the battle, but you can’t win ’em all. (How’s that for a bastardized cliche?)

Infrared Black and White

Cutting through the gloom with the telephoto

Eventually we punted, and headed back to the hotel for breakfast and the morning review session. After lunch, we hit the road again.

An old shed, shot through the window of the van as we cruised past.

Before they put on the workshop, our leaders did a scouting trip to the Palouse, cruising around and looking for potential goodness. While driving the farm country roads, they came across a tree they thought to be outstanding in its field.

As it had yet to clear up, we got the benefit of a dramatic sky. The tree would not have been near as cool with a bluebird sky backing it up.

At another point we stopped to shoot whatever, and a couple of us broke out our drones. I was one of them. Drones are new to me. I’m learning a new set of skills; both to fly the thing, and to create videos/stills with it that don’t look like complete crap. It’s a work in progress. I’ve created my first video from the drone and stills from the trip; I’ll include a link in the final post in this series to wrap it up.

Meanwhile, I also found something to point the macro lens at…

I wasn’t the only one flying in this neighborhood

… and something to point the telephoto at.

Steptoe Butte. Google maps tells me it was about 10 miles away and about 3600 feet high.

In the late afternoon, it was time to head back up to Steptoe. The weather had finally begun to clear, the wind had dropped to near nothing (rare for Steptoe), and the shadows and warm light were setting up beautifully. If there was a karmic payback for getting up at godawful in the morning and seeing little more than fog for our pains, we got it back with near perfect conditions in the evening.

Since the scope of the view was so vast, and the slices of perspective offered by the telephoto were relatively small, I opted to mostly shoot panorama style; many shots, stitched together after the fact into one big, wide landscape smile.

This may be a good time to click on individual photos for a larger, more detailed view, WordPress shrinks even regular shots too much. Even on the clickthrough, WordPress sometimes sticks its own wrapper around a still somewhat shrinked picture, but sometimes the pic goes straight to a full browser image. If the first option occurs you can right click the pic and open it in a new tab. Or you could cut to the chase and use right click from the get go.

Don Quixote would be seriously overmatched here; many windmills, each maybe 300 feet high.

So we stood along one flank of Steptoe, only part way up to get a closer view of the hills but still high enough for perspective, and hung out for two or three hours watching the sun and clouds paint shadow pictures across the hills and dells.

And as time crept along and the sun moseyed over the horizon, the shadows faded and the warm yellows and oranges shifted to blue.

Eventually the landscape, presumably not susceptible to insomnia, called it a night and slept well until sunrise. Later, following its example, so did I.

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