Sunday, November 19, 2017

Harvest Moments in the Field

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 DI VC G2 Lense, Nikon 70-300mm f4-5.6 VR Lense, SB-700 Speedlight, Vanguard Abeo Plus 363CT Tripod, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

The fall is the favorite time of the year for me for a number of reasons and one of the reasons is being in the field harvesting the corn and beans. Big equipment rolling across the fields with beautiful sunsets or sitting underneath the clear night sky, made for a great scene to capture with my camera.

For the night sky images, the D750 was used with the Tamron 24-70mm while the sunsets were captured with the 70-300mm. During the night exposures, aperture was set at f2.8 and ISO ranged from 3200-8000. Shutter speeds ranged from 5 to 20 seconds. Shooting from the tripod, I manual focused on the combine and turned off VR. The SB-700 Speedlight was used for additional light when needed. The self timer was used to trigger the camera. For the sunset images, I used the 70-300mm with an aperture of f6.3 to f9 and ISO of 100-1250.

To edit the images, Lightroom Classic was first used on the RAW files by first using the presets that I’ve developed for landscapes and star images. A little further adjustment to the sliders was made on an individual image basis but the presets were a great start and saved time. Lens correction was made using the catalog of lenses that Lightroom has in their program for distortion and vignetting.

To finalize the images, Photoshop CC was used to clone out unwanted spots in the image using the clone tool or content aware fill tool. If further noise reduction was needed, I applied that in PS. I then straightened and cropped the image if needed. A sharpening layer was then applied as the last step of the process.


With nearly all the fields out in the area, the harvest is almost complete and once again, the scenes didn’t disappointment the farmer and photographer in me. 

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