Golden Tassels over Farmers Cooperative

The dog days of summer have produced some beautiful colored skies and with a great view of a corn field and the co-op, I took the opportunity to capture these scenes. This evening I set up my camera on top of the Ranger to get above the growing corn and waited for the golden light from the setting sun.

 

The D90 was fitted with the 24-120mm lense and I used the camera both on and off the tripod. When on the tripod, I turned off VR on the lense and kept it on when handholding the camera. Depending on the focus point I wanted in the scene, I either used manual focus or let the autofocus do the work. I was shooting right into the sun so I kept the ISO low at 200 and even reduced the exposure compensation. I had the dial on the D90 set at aperture priority or manual and ranged the aperture from f9-22. I also used the SB-700 Speedlight to light up the corn plants directly in front of me. The D90 pop-up flash triggered the 700 with it being in remote mode and the power on the flash ranged between 1/64 to 1/1.

Nikon’s ViewNX was used to process the RAW files into Tiff’s but first, a few adjustments were made. To help increase the orange tint in the images, I changed the white balance to Shade and then changed the picture control to my Nature-Landscape. Doing these two adjustments darkened the images so to brighten them up again; I used the exposure compensation and shadow protection slider.

I used PSE11 to do the final processing on the images by first cloning out unwanted objects with the clone brush. Next step involved layer masks and gradients to merge selected images together if I wanted to showcase the foreground or background. The second to last step was the use of the high pass sharpening filter followed by layer masks/brush tool to paint over areas that I didn’t want sharpened. The last step was using the crop tool if needed.

I’m also using a new frame for the first time on these photographs that offers the actual image a larger area inside the frame.  I got the advice from a fellow photographer that my old frame was taking too much away from the photograph because the frame and mat was too large on the web.

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