Golden Corn Fields over FC Coop 14

In  late June I took to the corn field to capture the sitting sun behind Yale’s FC Coop. Wanting to get myself in the shots like I was scouting the corn field, I had to position myself between the two sets of grain bins. This was a trail & error situation until I found the right spot and then left my camera strap lying on the corn. I was able to walk though the corn field to the strap in the 15 seconds I had set for the self timer on the D90 and try to pose.

I had the D90 set up on my Slik tripod above the corn and had the 24-120 mm lense with a focal length of 62mm. Being on a tripod, I had VR off and used manual focus. I set the focus to infinity to allow most everything in the scene to be in focus.  Camera settings were RAW, aperture priority and ISO of 200. I used either f13 or f9 to capture the scene along with an exposure compensation of -2 or 0.

To process the RAW files, I used ViewNX 2 and Adobe Camera Raw. Using ViewNX, I changed the white balance to shade and the picture control to Nature-Landscape. To be able to make HDR images out of the files, I did make separate files using exposure comp. of -1, -.5, 0, .5 & 1.0. I did this on a couple of the files to try to show the whole dynamic range of the scene. I created the HDR image using EasyHDR. The other RAW files were adjusted using Camera Raw using the sliders in that program such as exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, clarity, vibrance and saturation.

I finished off the processing in PSE 11 by cloning out one wanted sun spots and other items in the image. Made sure my background lines were straight and adjusted if need using the rotate tool. To sharpen the image, I than used the high pass filter along with a layer mask. This allowed me to brush out areas that I didn’t want sharpened, mostly the sky.

With the rain and warm temperatures, the corn has quickly grown over my head in a few days so I’m glad I was able to capture these farming scenes.

 

 

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