Harvest 2012- The Scenes of a Farmers Life

The fall harvest is my favorite time of year as farmers across Iowa are in the field day after day taking out the crops. With a very dry year, the farmers started early and the combines put plenty of dust into the atmosphere to help create spectacular sunsets. When I wasn’t in the cab myself, I tried to time it right with my camera to capture the scene of harvest.

I called upon the 18-105mm and 12-24mm lense to capture these scenes and kept VR on because I didn’t have time to set up my tripod when I was taking images of the combine coming through the field. With the darker conditions, ISO ranged between 200-500 and aperture was between f9 to f36. The f36 and other big apertures were used when I was using my SB-700 to light up the bean stalks with the sunset in the background. Aperture and Manual mode was set on the dial to help control depth of field and how much light was entering into the camera. I also adjusted the exposure compensation to the negative side quite often. The SB-700 lite up the bean stalks and barn in manual remote mode in 1/1 power.

During post processing in ViewNX, the raw files were adjusted for exposure compensation, white balance, picture control and highlight/shadow. Exposure compensation was increased while the white balance was set to either direct sunlight or shade. For the picture control, I used the custom sport and nature/landscape settings or kept it at standard. To create HDR images, I copied the RAW files into different exposures and then outputted them into 16bit Tiff files.

I have just updated EasyHDR to the newest version, EasyHDR Pro 2.0 to help create HDR scenes. I used five different exposed images (-1, -.5, 0, +5, +1) and allowed the program to merge them together. I used some custom presets from EasyHDR along with increasing the saturation when tone mapping was applied.

PhotoShop Elements 8 was used to finalize the images by taking advantage of its tools. The first step was using the clone brush to get rid of unwanted items followed by straightening and cropping the image. The levels and hue/saturation layers along with masks were used to fine tune the wide range of colors in these scenes. Lastly, the high pass sharpen filter was used to sharpen the images.

It is hard to believe the harvest is complete but it was a successful one again with my camera along for the ride.

 
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#44. An image that was taken during last year's harvest, reprocessed using EasyHDR2.0 in B/W.

 
#45. An image that was taken during last year's harvest, reprocessed using EasyHDR2.0.