Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Soybean Harvest 2013

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: