Harvest is starting to get finished up here in central Iowa but it was in full swing a few weeks ago when I was out helping my Dad in the field. When I could, I carried my camera to capture some of the great images from the harvest that fill the land during the fall.
I captured these images with the Nikon D90 and 18-105mm lense on a couple different days. Like I often do when shooting something that is landscape oriented, I put the camera in AV mode and used the RAW format to allow white balance correction if needed.
With the beautiful clouds and sunset during the time I was taking these photographs, I choice not to do too much work in ViewNX and PSE8. Basically the only adjustments that were made was changing the Picture Control in ViewNX to a custom Landscape curve I’ve created and putting the white balance to cloudy. These two adjustments made the colors richer and more realistic. Two of the images are a black and white conversion using the Virtual Studio plug in PSE8. For those two images, I used the World War II b/w filter and underexposed the filter a wee bit.
If this weather ever starts to change, hopefully I will be able to get some waterfowl hunting scenes. I’m looking forward to clicking away on incoming ducks and geese. I’ve also added a remote shutter release controller to allow me to set up my camera away from my blind and take pictures. It will be a fun fall and winter learning to use that.
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Driving by the local marsh that I duck hunt on, I discovered sunflower plants alongside the road. With the sun shining on them as it was going down at night, I stopped a couple of different times to use my camera.
Since some of the sunflowers were down in the ditch by the water, I used either my Slik tripod or Manfrotto monopod to steady the camera. To control the depth of field and what was in focus, I put the Nikon D90 in AV mode and adjusted the aperture from f5.6 to f13 on different shots. As usually, I shot in RAW to allow me to adjust white balance and other important settings on the computer. I also used the bracketing feature on the D90 which made me want to shut off the autofocus and VR on the lenses that I used. I switched between the Nikon 18-105mm and the Sigma 50-150 mm lense to get these images.
The images were processed in ViewNX or Adobe RAW (PSE8) by adjusting the white balance, picture control and sharpness if needed. This was the first time I processed RAW images in Adobe Camera RAW which allowed me to get a different looking image then ViewNX. The feature I like about Adobe Camera RAW was the fill light adjustment which helped me lighten up some dark spots in the image without affecting other areas too much.
Final post processing was done in PSE8 and EasyHDR. I created a few HDR images by combining different exposed shots in EasyHDR and adjusting the saturation and tone curve settings. Using PSE8 and the plug in VirtualPhotographer, I processed some of the sunflower images into b/w backgrounds, poster edges, nightscope b/w, etc. to create different looking images. In order to use those, I had to use layer masks and the paint brush to delete the parts of the image that I wanted to be left alone.
Finally, the finished image was copied into the gallery frame that I created in PSE8 to show off the photograph in a more professional manner. This gallery frame will be used for my photography from now on this website and in other areas where I post such as facebook and hunting forums.
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#9. Nightscope b/w background from VirtualPhotographer
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#17. Poster Edge filter in PSE8
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Late in July, crop dusting planes and choppers were flying the corn fields spraying for bugs and I was lucky to catch this chopper close to home. Last year I photographed a plane so I was excited to have something new to snap some images on. I didn't realize that the choppers tanker was just up the road from the house either so that offered some good images too.Needing to zoom in on the chopper, I used my 70-300mm lense on the Nikon D90 and most of the time for these images had it above 200mm. To get sharp images, I used AV Mode and quick ISO adjustments to keep the shutter speed high to freeze the movement of the chopper. I also used selected focus point because sometimes I had the chopper in the left or right side of the image so I wanted to control were the camera was focusing in on. I do wish the sky and sun would of been more favorable but a photographer cannot control that.These images are actually jpeg's out of the camera instead of my usual RAW files so I had less amount of post processing involved. I did adjust them in ViewNX and added some sharpness and contrast too them. I then opened up the jpeg's in PSE8 and used Action Curves with Layer Marks, Levels and a few other adjustments to adjust the final color to my liking. I also cropped the images if needed to get rid of unwanted things in the image. Hopefully for my next update I will be starting to have images from hunting, harvest, antumn and the golf course as we are entering the favorite time of the year for me, Fall. Recently I went over 10,000 clicks on my Nikon D90 so I hope to continue to improve and capture what I get to see in the great outdoors.#1.
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