There are times that I find myself driving on backroads somewhere searching for something that peaks my interest enough to get out of the car with my camera and create a photograph. Most of the time, I find myself seeing something, getting exciting and shooting the entire scene. Rarely, are these shots the photo that I imagined when I stopped the car.
The images below are a great example of this experience. All of these images were shot on a drive in Eastern Washington. I spent a good deal of time looking at the clouds and the wheat fields. I thought they looked really cool even in the mid-afternoon sun. As I stood there on the side of the road, I made several shots of the scene. As you can see in the first image, there is not much exciting about this shot. Pretty bad light, pretty plain subject or more to the point a lack of a subject. There are times that in my interest to keep moving, I shoot a shot like this and get back in the car only to be disappointed later when looking at the image.
The disappointing stems from the lack of time I give myelf to focus on what really attacted me to the scene in the first place. In this case, was it the clouds, the green fields, the wheat or something else. Luckily on this trip, I did take the time to explore what mattered. In the end it was the wheat that fascinated me. The texture, color and repeating patterns all drew my attention. Focusing on those things allowed me to create these images that I think do a better job of showing what I was seeing that day driving down that dirty road.
All images shot on Nikon D300s with 24-70mm F/2.8 lens on Lexar UDMA compact flash media.
