Harvest 15 Moments in the Field

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 & D90, 24-120mm f4 lense, 70-300mm lense, SB-700 & Slik Pro 500DX Tripod

The fall is by far my favorite time of year as it means spending time in the field harvesting the crop and also in the marsh hunting waterfowl. This year, harvest started early and ended early and in between, I was out amongst the green John Deere’s to capture the scene.

The above equipment was used in aperture mode and manual mode. Aperture ranged from f7.1 – 11, ISO 400-800 and adjustments to the exposure compensation were made for the sunset images. For the nightscape combine images, manual mode was set to f4 and shutter speed ranged from 15-30 seconds. I shot off the tripod for the nightscapes along with using the SB-700 Speedlight in manual mode to expose the combine.

Adjustments in Capture NX-D included exposure compensation, white balance, picture control, saturation, shadow and noise reduction. The white balance was set to direct sunlight for the nightscapes while the others were set to shade. Sport picture control was used to enhance the vibrancy of the images. 

To finalize the images, Elements 11 was used to first clone out unwanted objects in the image. Next I straightened and cropped if needed. I than went to work using curve and layer masks to adjust exposure in certain parts of the image. This was often on the top of the image for the sky enhancement. The last step involved using an unsharp layer to sharpen the image.

StarStaX was used to make the star trail image of the combine in the dark by combining a series of images that were taken at the same interval using the Viltrox shutter remote.

 
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Astrophotography: Old Barn & Cribs

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 with 24-120mm f4 lense, SB-700 & Slik Pro 500DX tripod.

Back in September on the night of the eclipse, I was excited to get out with my new camera body. Even though the moon was bright, during the eclipse there was a period of time that the sky turned dark and the stars were out. I traveled over to a local farmstead to capture the scene.

The above equipment was used in manual mode with the shutter speed set to between 10 to 30 seconds and an aperture between f4 to f6.3 Because of the new camera body and its ISO performance; I was able to increase the ISO higher than I’ve done with my D90 to 3200. I shot in RAW and turned off the VR. I used my headlamp to shine on the barn to allow the D750 to focus on that in the dark and then I switched the autofocus off. I exposed the buildings by using the SB-700 and manually triggering the flash.

In Capture NX-D, I adjusted the white balance to either direct sunlight for an orange cast or fluorescent for a blue cast in the sky. Picture control was changed to sport or nature-landscape while the exposure compensation was adjusted if needed. I increased the contrast and saturation as well. Astro noise reduction was also used.

StarStaX was used to create one star trail image by stacking just 4 images together that had an exposure of 30 seconds each. This resulted in a very small star trail on this particular shoot. If I would have had more time, I’d done a much larger star trail.

I did the final adjustments in PSE 11 by starting with the clone brush to get rid of telephone lines/poles that were running through the background of the image. To help increase the brightness of the stars in the sky, I discovered that using a glowing edge filter and reducing the opacity to a low percentage, works pretty well. Back in NX-D, some of the scenes I changed the picture control to nature-landscape to help give contrast and color to the buildings so that part of the image was layered into the sky images if I desired to use them. The last adjustment was to sharpen the image using the high pass sharpen filter.

The first night out with the D750 was a fun one and with its much improved performance over my D90, I’m looking forward to continued work underneath the stars. 

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Astrophotography - Windmill Nightscape

Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 12-24mm f4 lense, Slik Pro 500DX tripod & Viltrox Remote.

A new moon and clear skies were forecasted for a few weeks ago so after getting permission to get on this property with a windmill, I ventured out to the location at 11:00 PM. A security light lit up the windmill so I didn’t need any speedlights on this nightscape shoot.

The above equipment was used in manual exposure mode with a shutter speed set to bulb, aperture at f4 and ISO at 1250 or 1600. I used the D90’s live view to help accurately focus the lense on the windmill. The Viltrox remote was set to do anywhere from 6 to 45 second length exposures. The 45 second exposures were used to create the star trail images by shooting each image 5 seconds apart for a total of 45 images.

In Capture NX-D, I adjusted the white balance to fluorescent and picture control to sport. The exposure compensation was increased 1/3 of a stop. To help reduce noise, I clicked the astro noise reduction feature. Shadow/Highlight sliders were also tweaked if need be.

StarStaX was used to create the star trail images by stacking 45 and 22 shot collections of the images together. Because I only separated each image by 5 seconds, I was able to use the gap filling function in StarStaX to make sure the star trails didn’t have any holes in them.

I opened the Tiff files in PSE 11 to do the final adjustments on these nightscapes. I had properly exposed images for the windmill and the sky so I had to blend them together using layer masks and the brush tool. The clone tool got rid of unwanted objects in the foreground of the image. Once all the adjustments were done, I sharpened the final image with a high pass filter.

With a new moon forecasted next to be in mid October, hopefully I’ll be able to capture harvest equipment below the beautiful bright sky filled with billions of stars. 

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Summer Flowers - Sunflowers, Tiger Lillies & More

Equipment Used: Nikon D750 with 24-120 mm f4 lense, Nikon D90 with 35mm f1.8, 12-24mm f4, 24-120 mm f4 and 75-300mm lenses. Nikon SB-700 Speedlights, Slik Pro 500DX Tripod & Viltrox Remote.

During the summer months, the flowers were in full bloom and on a few still nights, I got out with my camera to capture the bright colors. The D750 captured the lilies, hollyhochs and the purple flowers during the short time I had the rental. The sunflower plot was not in bloom during my rental so I captured all of them with the D90.

I used the above equipment with the following settings: aperture of f9-f18 (f16 & f18 was used to get the sunbursts around the sun), VR off and manual focus on the lense. ISO was either at 200 or 400 and the exposure compensation ranged from 0 to -2. The EC was set to negative when I used the SB-700’s to light up the main part of the flowers.

In NX-D, the white balance was adjusted to direct sunlight and picture control to either landscape or nature-landscape. These adjustments helped bring out more detail and saturation to the flowers. If needed, the highlight/shadow sliders were adjusted as well. Only a few images were turned into HDR, so I used -1, 0 & +1 exposure compensated Tiff files in EasyHDR to process them that I created in NX-D.

Using PSE 11 to finalize the images I first used the clone tool to get rid of unwanted objects in the images. If local adjustments to the exposure in certain parts of the image needed adjusting, I used curve adjustments and layer masks. The final step was using the high pass sharpen filter to sharpen the images.

Now that summer is winding down, it’s time to capture the scenes of waterfowl hunting, harvest and starlit nights.

 

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