Highway 34 — Barn and Fence
Detasseling — Video
A post part of the continuing effort to get some of my video work onto the blog. This was from a little while ago. I had always been curious about what detasseling was and why it was so important. Not only is it important for farmers to create their hybrid corn, but it’s an annual rite of passage for many area kids. The ‘summer job’ of summer jobs, especially for kids who can’t drive themselves.
Highway 34 — Sorghum Field
Tucked away in a valley along the highway is a grove of trees. I’ve been wanting to try and shoot the grove, because it’s characteristically Nebraska. Back in the old days, trees were primarily found near water. This was the plains afterall and not Michigan. I hopped out of the car and looked for a way to shoot the woods and the dappled light and nothing looked right. So I turned a little to my right and saw the sorghum field between the farmhouse and the trees and the picture fell into place.
The Lily Lessons – Aperture
The aperture of a camera is a measure of how wide the opening is that lets light into the camera. In most point and shoot and SLR cameras this setting can be manually adjusted for every lens. Each setting is called an f-stop and the core scale is: f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16 and f/22. Just like ISO each full stop allows twice as much light through the lens or half as much, again depending which way you go. Unlike ISO the larger the number the less light allowed through the lens.
On the above scale f/1.4 allows in the most light and f/22 the least. F/8 allows in half as much light as f/5.6.
Aperture controls not only how much light is allowed through a lens but also how much depth of field is in your picture. Depth of field is the amount of a picture that is in focus from the foreground (or front of a picture) through the middle ground to the background.
An aperture of f/22 allows more of the picture to be in focus than f/2 for example. F/2 is said to have a shallow depth of field (like the shallow end of a pool) while f/22 has a wide depth of field.
A shallow depth of field allows you to really focus attention on the subject of your picture because the background will be out of focus. A wide depth of field can be useful for landscapes where virtually everything is in focus.
In this first example you can see how the flower in the middle is in sharp focus while the flower closer to the camera in the lower left is out of focus and the background is a blur of other flowers.
As we increase our depth of field the foreground and middle ground flowers are becoming more clear in the photograph.
The foreground and middle ground are in good focus. Notice how the leaves in the background are clearer but not totally in focus.
Now at f/22 the background is in greatest focus possible for the lens.
Highway 34 — Part 1
I’ve begun a new project to keep myself occupied. Every day I drive from Lincoln to Grand Island or the other way, and the next day I reverse it. I’ve become very familiar with the scenery along Highway 34 and decided to start up a medium format project to illustrate what I see. It’s a landscape project, or maybe an architecture project or even a people project. It all depends on my mood and what I decide to shoot.
At the moment it is still in it’s begining stages and I’m mostly focused on the major things I see. I haven’t really delved into detail shots and I haven’t been shooting long enough to show seasons. So here is the first image to be shown, and one that kick started the idea for the project. A neat barn with a flag and date. Nothing special, but it caught my eye. And the more I think about these old barns I realize they aren’t going to be around forever and will eventually be replaced by quonset huts that are far easier to maintain.
When I rolled up, I had the image of just the barn and the farmyard, but then I saw the mailbox and thought the old rusted thing added a nice touch to the frame.
