Namibian dreams amongst barley fields

If you told me that Namibia was a desert, you would be forgiven my insistence that it is more a great green field of flowing barley littered with very bad architecture. That's in the month of March. The bad architecture remains the whole year round.

I have just returned from these such barley fields and I am once again an inspired photographer. When concentrating on landscapes, I tend to find the strongest styled composition possible. This becomes a very frustrating experience, especially when wandering through 10 000 hectares of flowing barley heads. But I was told to do so by Hougaard Malan, a master of composing (and who was co-leading our desert landscape workshop with me {who was lost in composition...}), that grass and sky was a good, simple composition. So with much beligerance myself an 7 other photographers were trying to make something out of this damned blowing grass.

And then the sun came. Not your normal sun, but rather a golden shower escaping under a blanket of cloud about to burst its contents upon us. Barley turned to gold, skies turned to fire and inspiration flowed and clicked amazingly quickly.
In 15 minutes it was all over. A group of us quiet in the darkening dusk all that remained. Who said Namibia was a desert?
It's one large barley field of gold.

Click on the image to see it large on the lightbox.