Harvesting Golden Moments

These past few weeks is the favorite time of year for me as the weather starts to turn, the harvest is in full swing and hunting season begins. With all this going on, having the Nikon with me at all times is a must. While riding the gravel roads and helping the family on the farm, I had the opportunity to capture the moments that matter most.

For these images, I used the D90 that was fitted with either the 18-105mm or 12-24mm lense since I was capturing landscape scenes. The camera was set to RAW to allow post processing of the files on the computer. I ranged the aperture from f9 to f11 and the ISO from 200 all the way up to 3200.  ISO 3200 was needed to capture the shots in the dark but next time I need to remember to change a few settings in camera to help with noise reduction. To capture the bright colors of the sunset, I used either exposure compensation or bracketing to help darken the sky. Since I was shooting on the go, my tripods were not used at any time.

Using ViewNX, I changed the white balance to either cloudy or shade to get the right colors I wanted for these fall scenes along with a picture control of landscape-nature that I use so often. The highlight and shadow protection sliders were also used if needed to get the right balance between the sky and farm equipment.

After the files were changed to tiff’s, I opened them up in PSE8 to do the final adjustments. A little cloning was done to get rid of unwanted objects. To improve the sky even more, I used a levels adjustment along with a layer mask to finalize the beauty that fall sunsets offer.

My favorite image of the batch is with the combine unloading corn into the grain cart blowing corn dust towards me with the sun setting behind the combine. This image was taken standing on top of the tractor tire while it was parked and is #19.

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