I have been working hard on a project this summer and fall.  It’s the reason why I haven’t had many updates to my landscape portfolio lately.  This project has presented some interesting challenges for me as a landscape photographer.  I had to find a way to make potato fields look pretty.  Somehow, I managed to do so.  Here’s the story of how.

I received a call in July from a representative of the Pleasant Valley Potato coop, based in Aberdeen Idaho, requesting my services.  Apparently, they wanted to update their website and include high quality landscape photos of the process of potato-growing.  They had hired another photographer for the job but he didn’t end up being able to complete the job.  Sadly, by the time the coop learned of this, it was well into the growing season already.

By the time I received the call, it was almost time to enter the final stages of growth which involves killing the plants on top of the ground and letting the potatoes ripen below ground.  I quickly got to work taking pictures of each farmer’s fields as suggested by the coop’s web designer.

Some highlights included the morning where I was heading to one field before sunrise and looked back to see a glorious sunrise starting to warm up.  We had just enough time to get in place before the sun rose.  However, it was not the field which we had initially set out to photograph that day.  Still, it worked out beautifully.

As harvest approached, I prepared to go back out and photograph the farmers and their hired hands harvesting the potatoes from the fields.  Harvest time was a small window of time.  I had to work fast in order to capture the equipment in the fields, the potatoes being stored in the cellars and silos, and the potatoes being processed up in the processing plant for shipping to stores nationwide.  I dedicated a few days to getting the photos needed and came back with lots of photos for my client.

My client received over a hundred photos to use on their website.  What I’m showing here is merely a small sampling of what I delivered.

I was glad to work with Pleasant Valley Potato on improving their website.  I hope that they will call me back again next year to pick up the early stages of the growing season which I missed.  If that happens, there will be an addendum to this project which I will publish here when it’s ready.

Stay tuned sometime next summer for a part two.

Check out this gallery to see these and more potato fields photos from this project.

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