I was driving through Eastern Oregon on a late summer’s day when I caught the edge of a big thunderstorm as it was rising up in front of me. I anticipated wet roads, not the dry fields I was driving through.

Huge bales of hay were stationed like guard shacks across the horizon. Their harvest and general dryness contrasted with the irrigated fields and the huge clouds still filling to cloud-burst proportions.

For me it was all about the clouds—their size, their weight and their bruise-purple colors tending to blue. The challenge was to render their value and chroma convincingly.