Barley and the Palouse

A few weeks ago, I visited Washington’s Palouse area for the first time and hopefully not the last. This region is famous for its cereal grain fields and rolling hills with red barns spread throughout. When I was working on the image selection for the show at Misho Gallery, my visual memories of this trip were still vivid and I decided that this would be my theme.

Rolling Hills, Palouse
Rolling Hills, Palouse

Surprisingly to me, the harvest was already well under way in early July as they experienced unusually dry weather this year. Due to the hilly landscape, the combine harvesters can’t run straight lines and this is what creates these cool patterns. For the panoramic picture below, I stitched together 5 images taken at 400mm.

Palouse Harvest Pattern
Harvest Pattern, Palouse

I love these two landscape images, but in the end they didn’t make the cut for the show. Instead I selected closeups of spikes. Static as in the next image, or dynamic as in the last two.

Barley #1
Barley #1

The next two images were created a bit later in the afternoon when the wind started to pick up. I intentionally selected a slow shutter speed to show the moving spikes. I tried different exposure times and like following results the best.

Spikes in the wind #1
Spikes in the wind #1

 

Spikes in the wind #2
Spikes in the wind #2

 

These last three images are currently on display at Misho Gallery until August 15.






Prints and Licensing: All images are available as fine art prints and for licensing. Please contact me for more details.

2 thoughts on “Barley and the Palouse”

    1. Hey Rod, yep, it was a bit toasty ~100º during the day. But this meant it wasn’t that cold in the middle of the night either! I am looking forward to see the hills covered in different shades of green or covered with snow would be cool (hehe) too!
      Best /daniel

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