The Palouse – Land Of Surprises and Great Photos
Sorry for the radio silence for the last week. Life has gotten busy on many fronts—all very exciting. This last week, I have been running a workshop in the Palouse. I have been traveling to the Palouse region almost every year since 2004. The Palouse is a large region of southeast Washington. I call it the Tuscany of America.
It’s a region of beautiful and gently rolling hills and is the largest wheat-growing area in America. For photographers, it offers a wealth of photographic possibilities. There are landscapes, abandoned farms, homes, trucks, and cars. There are grain elevators, giant waterfalls, and skies, unlike those I have seen elsewhere.
Towns are dotting the Palouse, which is just a shell of what they once were. The buildings tell stories of what it must have been like back in the day. The people are also very special. They are some of the nicest people I have ever come across. Hard-working farmers who never hesitate to give away as you pass them by on the many dirt roads of the Palouse.
The Palouse is one of my happy places. I have been coming here for twenty-plus years, and I still find new locations to photograph. I also bear witness to the many changes that have taken place. Many abandoned places that looked like regular homes twenty years ago have begun to collapse as nature reclaims them.
There are no overlooks in the Palouse, like in many parks. The views you capture with your camera come at you fast and heavy as the landscape of wheat and canola take on their own beauty by the changing light of the day.
This Past Week
When I first started doing workshops in the Palouse I was doing so with 12 or more people. At one point we did a Phase One workshop with 34 people and five instructors. Now-a-days I take a maximum of five people and we travel around in a large SUV like a Suburban or Ford Navigator. Other workshops are vans with eight or more or car pool caravans.
Doing it like I do, we are all together in one car; we talk photography, we shoot together, and we eat together. Also, we move fast, especially when chasing the light at the end of the day. We literally criss-cross the Palouse during our five days. On this trip, I had attendees from as far away as Australia.
I do two workshops every June, and we just finished the first one, and the next is about to get underway. I pick my clients up at the airport and return them there when the workshop is over. We stay in Pullman at the lovely Hampton Inn and eat at some of the best restaurants around. More than anything else we have fun, make friends and experience some of the finest photography you can imagine.
The photographs accompanying this article are just some of the early picks. It’s going to take sometimes to go through all the images we captured. I will share more in another article further down the road.
One of the highlights of this trip was an evening of once-in-a-lifetime sunset skies. The color was just spectacular. See the pictures in this article. Everyone was shooting the sunset, and then the sky above us lit up so beautifully. It was so cool, and it just kept changing by the second. All of us got great photos, and it served as a reminder always to be looking around you.
The forecast for the next five days looks good. I look forward to taking this next group to some of my favorite locations and sharing the joy I have learned in the Palouse.
My Gear
On this trip, I am taking a lot of images with the iPhone Pro Max 15. In addition, I am using a Fuji XT-5 and XH2 with an assortment of lenses. The iPhone is allowing me to catalog image locations and test out some new interesting processing apps.
Join Me Next Year
I’ll be offering two Palouse workshops in 2025. If you’d like to be notified first, please email me, and I’ll add you to the early notification list.
More Photos
Since this is a photography site, I will share more photos from this past week. Please enjoy.
Come back next week for part two, week two.
Kevin Raber
June 2024
Elevate Your Vision
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