The Palouse is always changing, be it weather, light, field textures and patterns or just the seasons. A photographer can shoot in the same place day after day and get vastly different images.
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I recently was driving through the snow-covered Palouse just at sunset. I came around a curve and spotted a group of trees just ahead. With the light, the trees were guaranteed to be silhouetted.
I pulled the car over to the edge of the road and my friend and I jumped out, grabbed our cameras and tripods and left the car running. There wasn’t much time left to capture the fleeting rays of sun.
Brent and I searched for a composition and started shooting. The sun lasted only about a minute before it ducked under the western horizon. That doesn’t stop a good photographer though. We kept shooting, enjoying the blue hour beauty.
When shooting during the blue hour it’s critical to have a tripod and a time-delay or remote shutter trigger to limit camera shake. This is important as the reduced light demands longer exposures.
What I particularly enjoyed about the spot was the textured snow and the wind-whipped jet streams. I kept shooting until my camera battery died and my fingers were sufficiently frozen. The warm car beckoned and I crunched my way back through the knee-deep snow.
