Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Harvest 15 Moments in the Field


Equipment Used: Nikon D750 & D90, 24-120mm f4 lense, 70-300mm lense, SB-700 & Slik Pro 500DX Tripod

The fall is by far my favorite time of year as it means spending time in the field harvesting the crop and also in the marsh hunting waterfowl. This year, harvest started early and ended early and in between, I was out amongst the green John Deere’s to capture the scene.

The above equipment was used in aperture mode and manual mode. Aperture ranged from f7.1 – 11, ISO 400-800 and adjustments to the exposure compensation were made for the sunset images. For the nightscape combine images, manual mode was set to f4 and shutter speed ranged from 15-30 seconds. I shot off the tripod for the nightscapes along with using the SB-700 Speedlight in manual mode to expose the combine.

Adjustments in Capture NX-D included exposure compensation, white balance, picture control, saturation, shadow and noise reduction. The white balance was set to direct sunlight for the nightscapes while the others were set to shade. Sport picture control was used to enhance the vibrancy of the images. 

To finalize the images, Elements 11 was used to first clone out unwanted objects in the image. Next I straightened and cropped if needed. I than went to work using curve and layer masks to adjust exposure in certain parts of the image. This was often on the top of the image for the sky enhancement. The last step involved using an unsharp layer to sharpen the image.

StarStaX was used to make the star trail image of the combine in the dark by combining a series of images that were taken at the same interval using the Viltrox shutter remote.
 
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