Summertime Farm Scenes

With the crazy spring weather and late planting season, the corn plants are shorter than usual and the soybeans just got planted. I took advantage of the conditions by taking out the D90 and getting some images of corn fields overlooking the FC Coop. I also experimented taking images of a pile of soybean sacks that I started on fire as the last field was being planted.

I fitted the D90 with the 20-120f4 lense along with using the SB-700 Speed Light. The Speed Light allowed me to get proper exposures for the foreground but yet get the background dark enough to showcase the cloud formations. As always, I was shooting in RAW and had the ISO between 400-500. I choice an aperture of f10 and adjusted the exposure compensation to -2 to -4 depending on the scene. The SB-700 was set to manual and remote.

The RAW files were transferred into ViewNX were I adjusted the exposure, white balance, picture control, and highlight/shadow parameters if needed. For the corn field images, I had a white balance of shade and for the fire images, I choice direct sunlight. Nature-Landscape was my desired picture control.

A few of the images I processed using HDR software, so I used ViewNX to change the exposure’s on those to be able to have multiple exposed images. EasyHDR was used to blend 3 to 5 images into one image.

Tiff files were imported into PS Elements 11 to do the final adjustments. I cloned out unwanted objects on the corn plants and sharpened to taste. I also created layer masks and used the gradient tool to merge a few different exposed images into one. Over the last few months of editing, I have grown to like the slow transition of merging different images that gradient maps allow me to do.

My favorite image from this group would be the close up of the corn plant with the beautiful colored cloud formations in the background. This was processed as an HDR and it really made the clouds pop in color.

 

#1.

 
#2.

 
#3.

 
#4.

 
#5.

 
#6.

 
#7.

 
#8.

 
#9.