I have left the Wheat series of posts hanging as I headed off to San Diego and began  writing about being there. This one gets us back to the series and there is one more after this: Wheat 6.

If you've been following this blog you know I have already subjected you to four posts about my wheat pictures. This one will go off topic a little, to show you pictures never before published of things I have photographed other than wheat fields on my many trips out to the Palouse.

As someone who travels to make pictures, and to the Palouse to photograph the wheat fields, there are times when I either run across something too good to pass up or make pictures to counter the sheer repetitiveness of the subject I'm working with. Clearly "no man can survive on wheat alone", and I am no exception.

So what you'll see here are just that, pictures made as a side show to the main attraction; outtakes, in effect.

I won't go back too far but contain these to my digital days from about 2008 on up to last summer.

In this post we are starting off with 2008 and working up to last summer, 2012.

As most of my photographs in the area are made by stopping the car, getting out and making a picture I see many like this below where the road has been cut into the hill. Sometimes they are irresistible.

The first day out in 2008  I came across a circus in the middle of the fields at the State Fairgrounds outside of Colfax:

And a new miniature golf course on the outskirts of Moscow, Idaho:

From the 2009 trip on the road from Pullman, WA to Moscow, ID:

And out among the fields on the way down to the Columbia River towards Lewiston, Idaho:

 I almost always stop at the local cemeteries:

The 2010 trip produced the following outtakes:

The 2011 trip produced the following:

and, finally, the 2012 trip produced just a couple:

and this one, taking off to shoot aerials:

I hope you enjoyed these. Simple enough, but perhaps an insight into the area and how I photograph there.

A hypothetical conversation:

What's Next? 

Wheat. High Up. 

From the Air? Pointing Down?

Yes. Unbelievably Cool.

Can't Wait!

You have to. I haven't written it yet.

Oh, ok.

Soon.

In this post on the wheat pictures I've been making for the past twenty years I will look at the years from 2008-2012 to show my present practice of photographing in the Palouse in Washington from the ground. 

To lay the foundation: in these years I am only working digitally and am not shooting film anymore. So, no darkroom prints. My pictures from 2008 tend to look like this:

from a trip in late August. 

And look like this from a trip in June in 2009 (Wheat 2009):

These last two are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Art of the RI School of Design in Providence and were included in the exhibition America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now. 

The exhibition ended in January, 2013. I am proud that they were hung right across from a very beautiful Richard Misrach print.  

These below are from the 2010 trip (Wheat 2010). I was there in early September.

And these below are from the 2011 trip (Wheat 2011), which was about a month earlier than I'd ever been, in mid May. A very different landscape:

more bare, somehow more essential and raw.

Last in this post, the 2012 trip (Wheat 2012), which was in late July:

This is a time where the wheat is growing and green but some fields have been cut or are about to be cut to harvest the first planting. Colors range from the golds and browns you see here to a dusty green. It is a time when the area is at its most lush. It also is the time of year when I first photographed the Palouse in the 90's and when the area seems most like a kind of paradise.

I am going to conclude this post soon but finish it with some context as to what it is like to photograph here. The area is extensive; really hundreds of square miles of rolling hills used for agriculture on a major scale. The base towns for the area are Pullman and Colfax, Washington, with the former being larger. Across the state border is Moscow, Idaho and it also serves as a base. Both Moscow and Pullman are state university towns. Going there seems like going back in time as these are places that aren't hip or trendy, aren't major tourist destinations, aren't on Frommer's "go to" list. Pickup trucks prevail, traffic is sparse, Wendy's, McDonalds and Denny's are common, with a few older cafes, particularly in Moscow and Colfax.

My days while there are spent driving and photographing. The whole area is criss- crossed with dirt farm roads, dusty single lane paths that are used by farmers to get access to their fields. They also provide unsurpassed access to almost anywhere when in the fields.  My "kit" is simple: my DSLR with the 70-200 lens attached in the back seat of the rental car, sometimes lying back there with tripod attached and sometimes not. If it is bright out many of my pictures are shot hand held. Other lenses are kept in the case, either in the trunk or on the back seat. I photograph early and late in the day to use the best light. It seldom rains. 

Each time of year is very different in the Palouse, as I you've seen. I can't really state a favorite as they all are beautiful. I have been in all seasons, except winter and have that on my "to do" list for the next year or two.

I have to be careful this doesn't become a rant but over the years I've been photographing in the Palouse, other photographers have found it. There are photo trips, workshops, demos and meeting up with photo heroes. I don't think I've played a part in this as I don't know that many people have seen my wheat pictures. But I certainly know the area as well as anyone. If there was a groundswell of support behind the idea I would be honored to lead a group to the Palouse to photograph. Most of the other photography I've seen from the area, to be honest, doesn't look so good: cliché and over done pictorial banality, no offense intended. You'll get a chance to see in person whether I fail or pass this test as some of the work you've seen here and on my site will be in a show at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA opening Aril 6, 2013.

Next up, we'll look at other things I've shot while out in the area and then conclude with wheat aerial photographs.

So far in this Wheat series we've looked at early days: years in the 90's and early 2000's that were pre-digital, pre-aerial and pre-color. Then in Wheat2 we looked at my transition from career black and white photographer to using color extensively in my work and then early aerial work. In this post I will speak of the sea change of switching from 8 x 10 inch film-based photography to digital capture. Probably not a nail-biter like a John le Carré spy novel but nevertheless gripping, I hope.

So, by 2003 or so there are big changes happening in photography. Forecasts about the impending change to digital are being beaten by the actuality that consumer level digital cameras are already on store shelves. At school we invested in the first real professional digital camera from Nikon, the D1, a $10,000 camera with a 2 megapixel file size. I was starting to teach digital capture, we were buying low end point and shoot cameras for intro students to check out and in higher level classes we were making our own color profiles.  We also were beginning to print with inkjet printers, our first being an almost impossible machine to get a good print out of: the terrible Epson 7500.

Up until about 2004 I had been working in the hybridized system of shooting film (mostly 8 x 10) then scanning the processed film, then making inkjet prints using earlier versions of Photoshop with inkjet printers. As papers were poor in those earlier days a lot of us printed on water color papers and I was no exception.

But by 2005 and 2006 things were beginning to get interesting and better in digital capture. We bought several of the new Nikon D70's for school and I bought one too. Although I did photograph with it, it soon became apparent that this wasn't a real photographic tool, at least not one to make good prints from. I also bought the first good Epson 44 inch printer: the Epson Color Stylus 9600. 

This is an aside but in 2005 I took my last 8 x 10 trip. By this time this was such a logistical nightmare of getting equipment to the site that I was shipping the camera ahead to my destination. I rented an apartment in Cody, Wyoming for 5 weeks that summer, an area where I had worked on a ranch for two summers when I was a teenager. 

This is the kind of subject I was photographing and the camera I was shooting it with. I was working in black and white:

The above was made with a Nikon D70, as was this:

This may be wisdom in hindsight but this picture looks like I wish I could shoot things like this in digital but remember this is 2005. In other words, digital wasn't there yet but it sure as hell was coming.

By 2007 all that had changed. By then I had been through two iterations of digital  cameras: the Nikon D200 and the Nikon D300. Also by 2007 I was working more intensively with digital. Much of the Cabela's work was with the D300. When I wanted higher quality for larger prints I would stitch many frames together to obtain a larger file. I shot one whole summer while teaching in Venice stitching files together each night. Rendering times were often several hours.

The Nikon D3 was Nikon's first full frame DSLR and mine as well. This camera brought in a whole new level of file quality and by 2008 I was able to make prints that really fit into my definition of what a print should look like, in sizes up to about  22 x 17 inches and sometimes larger.

I shot wheat that summer, in 2008, with the D3:

These files had sharpness, subtlety, wonderful color rendition and a broad dynamic range. Plus, and this is big for a view camera photographer, I was making pictures like this hand held.

I was also making pictures like this hand held: 

with the same camera. Dreams were coming true. For the first time in my career, I was seamlessly blending the heavy duty, more serious landscape work with less formal more impulsive or even experimental pictures using the the same camera. For me, digital had fully arrived. I am often struck with how lucky I am to be alive at a time when one way of making photographs is fading away and another comes to relative maturity. 

Of course you are asking if I was still shipping the 8 x 10 camera out to Pullman to shoot wheat with it too?

No, the Wyoming trip was the last time I did that.

Next up in the extended Wheat series I will delve into trips from 2008-2012 and write about current practice while standing on the ground. After that we'll look at a series I am calling "outtakes", then in the last section I will write about the aerials made in the Palouse.

Stay tuned.

This is the second in a series of posts about the wheat pictures I've been making since 1993. In this one we'll take a look at the color 8 x 10 pictures I began making in 2001 and then finish with early aerials.

By 2001 I had made pictures in the Palouse region of Washington for several years.  I would fly out from Boston where I live, rent a car, book a motel, and spend most days on dirt farm roads looking for things to photograph with the 8 x 10 camera. Most trips were for ten days or so. In 2001 I brought with me ten sheets of Fujichrome Provia color transparency film. This was big. Why? Because for the previous thirty years all my photography had been in black and white. 

That summer I shot the 10 sheets of the color slide film and underexposed all 10 sheets. Clearly, if I was to work in color in 8 x10 I needed to get my shit together. So over the next nine months while teaching I practiced, shot film and worked on understanding color exposure and filtration better. By the time I was headed back to Washington to photograph in the summer of 2002 I felt confident I knew what I was doing.I shot about 50 sheets of Fuji that trip.So here I was photographing the fields in color and black and white too, although I was now less interested in those. I was interested in photographing wheat in color because color was fundamental to where I was and hugely different depending on when I was there. What also happened, of course, was that color started to slip into all the shooting I was doing. I was even shooting color series work in 120mm the way I had shot series work in black and white for twenty years. In short, big changes were afoot as the old rules no longer applied. There have been many things that have happened over my career that have reinvigorated my photography. Color at this time was one of them.

There's a catch and that is that there really wasn't a way to realize the color I was shooting in any high quality manner. Inkjet printing simply wasn't good enough yet, I hated C prints as they looked plasticky and veiled, Cibachromes were expensive and the chemistry was very bad. About the only way to see these was to print them at school using the Fuji printer we had, which used two rolls to make a print: a receiver sheet and a transfer sheet. It was good but the downside was that the printer only printed to 11 x 17 inches and each time you made a print it cost about $15.

It wasn't really until about 2003 or 2004 that I was able to realize these 8 x 10 inch transparencies as good prints that were large enough. I had several shows in those years at Studio Soto Gallery in Boston that highlighted this work. The prints were typically 4 x 5 feet and were inkjet prints.

Early Aerials

Since there is room I'll move now into telling about the early days of shooting the wheat fields from the air. I'll conclude this series of posts in Wheat 6 with more current aerials.

One of the trips I took out to the Palouse in the late 90's had me flying to Seattle and then flying back east to Pullman on a small turbo prop plane. This meant we were flying over much of the country I had been shooting from the ground. As the plane was low enough and it was clear enough I had a look for the first time at what the area looked like from the air. I decided then that I should see if I could  find a way to make some aerial photographs of the fields. 

A few days later I met Doug Gadwa. He owned a small air charter business at the Pullman airport. He told me he could take me up for an hour or so and that he had a Cessna high winged plane that had a removable back seat with a small plate in the floor that could be unscrewed. This would allow me to shoot straight down.

The only camera I had with me that might work was the Hasselblad Superwide (SWC). The next day, up we went. They had removed the rear seat for me and I lay on my stomach in front of a 4 inch square hole in the floor, looking straight down. I could either look through the hole to the ground sliding by us below or stick the camera in the hole to take a picture, but couldn't do both at the same time.

This is what the pictures looked like:

As it turned out the Superwide was a wonderful camera for photographing this way as it was wide and its 38 Biogon lens was very very sharp.

After that trip I began thinking of working aerially as simply being part of the way that I made pictures in Washington. What came next? Color, of course:

OMG! These pictures blew me away. I was so excited (and to be honest, terrified when up in the plane) by this way of working that in later years when I had made the switch to digital it seemed very natural to just make aerials wherever I thought there was the potential for good photographs. This was just as true in Utah in 2010:

as it was in Massachussetts when I got it in my head that I wanted to photograph islands off the coast that were private and inaccessible (MA Islands) in 2009. 

So, where does that leave us in the scheme of the Wheat pictures? Well, there is more story to tell and in the next installment in the Wheat series I'll write about my change from film to digital. We all know that this has been a revolution in how still photographs are made, but in my case moving to digital capture allowed me to make pictures I never could have before.

Wheat 3 coming up next. Stay with me.

I've been avoiding writing about Wheat, a series of pictures like none other for me, as I began it in 1993 and am still shooting wheat twenty years later. I think because it is such a big project it is hard to know how to start.  So, what I'm going to do is take a deep breath and just dive in and start at the beginning. This will be another multi-post series. Of course, readers may "opt out" at any point. I hope to be able to earn your interest throughout as I write about the history of the series and the many forms it has taken over the past twenty years. Some of you may remember that I've written before about the principle of returning again and again to the same material with a different mindset and Wheat is at the top of the list of this way of working for me.

Here we go.

For those of you who don't know how the project began let me start with that. 

On a shooting road trip across the US in 1993 I was returning home to Boston from several rainy days in Seattle in complete frustration. I was working with an 8 x 10 view camera in those days and there is no way to do anything outdoors with that camera in the rain. I crossed the Cascade Range (which almost always brings  better weather), headed back across Washington, spent a night in Coullee (which is a wonderfully odd place and the topic of a future post) and continued east towards Spokane. About an hour west of Spokane on State Highway 2 the highway goes through some wheat fields that are very beautiful. Thanks to Google Earth I can show you what these look like:

Sometimes Google Earth's color rendition leaves a little to be desired but you can get the idea. I only had six sheets of film left and was definitely in the mindset of getting home quickly but I stopped, shot the six sheets and made a note in my journal to come back to shoot more as it was really a very special place.

Here's one of the six sheets I shot in 1993:

with my car in the lower left of the frame (a sure indicator that I wasn't taking the pictures very seriously but was taking notice of the area to come back to in the future).

and one other:

For the next several summers I was teaching in Italy so didn't get back out to photograph in Washington but by 1997 I decided to take a break from Europe and booked a flight to Spokane to try shooting wheat for real. I stayed at a bed & breakfast  in the city and for a few days headed back west on Rt.  2 to shoot. My routine in those days would be to shoot early, go back to where I was staying mid day, reload my film holders, rest and hang out until 3 or so, then go back out to shoot until the sun went down. In a conversation one day with the owner of the B & B I told him what I was doing and where. He asked if I'd ever been to the Palouse.  I said "no, what's that?" It seems amazing to me that I didn't know what this was and I do research places better now than I did then. He said it was directly south a couple of hours and was this major wheat growing country near Colfax and Pullman.  So I went, and, for me at least, the rest is history. I have photographed there almost every year since.

The area is simply amazing. Rolling wheat, safflower and lentil fields that are diverse, almost endless, accessible via dirt farm roads and always changing with different seasons and planting cycles. Again, Google Earth:

You can see that this is a much hillier and varied landscape than the area west of Spokane.

This is one of mine, from 2012, at about 1200 feet up.

Here are a couple of the 8 x 10's that I took the very first year I photographed in the Palouse in 1997:

What is there about this large corner of the state that fascinates me so? I started out being consumed with the relative scalelessness (probably not a word but you get my drift) of the area in that something small, like a pebble in the foreground, could have the same visual weight as something big like a grain silo way off on the horizon. Being from New England, we very seldom have that level of openness. That was also why I was working in 8 x 10. The camera could convey the needed degree of detail better than any other. I also was intrigued with what happened when the scene was laid out using the Scheimpflug principle (explained well here by Wikepedia) so that the scene held sharpness from the closest foreground right out to the horizon without using depth of field. The ensuing photograph would have both sharpness and blur from the slow shutter speed I chose as the breeze blew the wheat. You can clearly see that in the image above (remember if you click on it it will get larger). Those first years photographing wheat I was still working only in black and white.

So, I am close to ending this first Wheat blog but need to fill out this section with what happened to the work I did the first year. 1997 was very early digital days but a local lab in Boston, Boris Color Labs, had just bought a first generation German machine called a Lambda made by Durst that could make large chemistry-based prints from scanned negatives.  I proposed to the lab that they make prints of 13 of the negatives I'd shot the summer before as the photographs were going to be in an exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston that spring. This way I'd get some very good prints and the lab could promote their new process. They accepted the proposal, a student of mine who worked at Boris made the scans, they then made the prints and framed them ready for exhibition. A few weeks later these 13 4 by 5 ft. images were hanging in the PRC's large hallway, completely dominating a members show.  I was very pleased with the outcome and very appreciative of the lab for their work on my behalf.

This early wheat work was represented in my black and white monograph, American Series published in 2006.

Next up in the Wheat series I will discuss starting to work in color for the first time in my career. 

Stay tuned.