With a wet spring, harvest time arrived late in central Iowa but it
proved to be a great opportunity to be out in the field and capture the scenes
of harvest. After running the combine for awhile, I let Dad run the controls
and I grabbed my camera.
Depending on my location to the combine, I shot with either the 12-24mm
or 24-120mm lense on the D90. With the 12-24mm, the wide angle allowed me to
sit within a few feet of the combine head as it passed by; I definitely was
paying attention to my steps. I shot in aperture or manual mode but kept the
aperture at f9. Manual mode was used when I had the SB-700 Speedlight involved in
exposing the image. The ISO was set at either 200-400 and I also adjusted the
exposure compensation if needed. To get the unloading shots, I climbed up in
the wagon and stayed in the corner since it was already ¾ full which allowed me
to shoot safely.
Once in ViewNX, the RAW files were adjusted by changing the white
balance to shade and the picture control to Nature-Landscape. The shadow and
highlight sliders were also adjusted to save parts of the image that were too
dark or bright. Tweaking the exposure compensation also helped with this. HDR
images were made as well out of these images so I copied files into -1.5, -.7,
0, +.7 & +1.5 exposure compensations which got me different exposed images.
I then merged those 5 files using EasyHDR.
Photoshop Elements 11 was used to finalize the images by using the
clone brush tool to get rid of unwanted objects in the images. I placed a grid
over the images and used the rotate tool to make sure the objects of the image
were straight too. The final step was to apply sharpening in the way of High
Pass filter with the blending mode set to overlay and opacity at 15%.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get any pictures of the corn harvest for
2013 but looking at these images will pass the time until I’m back in the
tractor this spring and the process starts all over again.
#1.
#2.
#3.
#4.
#5.
#6.
#7.
#8.
#9.
#10.
#11.
No comments:
Post a Comment