Sequim Lavender Fields

Author's Comments

The thing about Sequim that surprises me every time is how dry it is. You drive out from Seattle through the rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula, and then somewhere past Discovery Bay the sky opens up and the clouds simply stop. The mountains take all the weather and leave this little stretch of coastal prairie in the sun. It is the only place in western Washington that feels Mediterranean, and the lavender knows it. I prefer the second week of July. The first week the rows are still filling in, and by the third the heat has started to brown the edges of the earliest cultivars. Mid-July, late afternoon, the bees working the blooms and the light coming in low across the Strait of Juan de Fuca - that is when the fields do what you came for. The purple goes saturated and almost unreal in golden hour, and the rows pull your eye toward the Olympics in the background, still snow-streaked even in summer. A few things I have learned. The festival weekend is genuinely crowded, and if you can come on a Tuesday instead, the photographs come easier. The smaller farms off the main road tend to have more interesting compositions than the larger ones with parking lots. A longer lens compresses the rows beautifully. A wide lens lets you put a single bloom in the foreground with the mountains behind, which is the photograph I keep trying to make and have not quite gotten right. Bring water. The sun here is stronger than you expect for Washington.

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