I love the time right after sunset on the prairies when the deep blue night sky slowly descends. It squishes the glowing magenta light of the magic hour into the horizon below it. I pass this railway crossing all the time, and I always think about stopping to have a better look at it. But I rarely do. I’m glad I did this time because the light was stunning.
I saw this big Buck standing in a farm field watching me as I drove past, and I really wanted to make a great portrait of him. Unfortunately the whole herd of Deer took off running shortly after I stopped. It was already past sunset and really quite dark, so my shutter speeds were very slow. Instead of trying to make really sharp images I worked on making some pan-blurs (where the background is blurred by panning along while the main subject moves, keeping the subject relatively sharper) as they ran past me instead. I really like the granularity of the final image and to me it has a great vintage look and feel.
I posted several pictures of some hay bales the other day. The main reason I was attracted to that particular field, and to those particular images, was because of the vivid colors of the field and the sky. But after processing them something made me think that they might look really good in black and white. So I converted them all and I’m really excited about the new images that I was able to create!
I don’t do a lot of black and white photography, but every once in awhile certain images lend themselves to it. I don’t necessarily think that all of these images look better in Black and White than they do in color, but I really like them. This is a simple reminder or me that there are almost always several ways to make every image look great, and that experimentation can be lots of fun!
I’ve seen this field of hay bales many times recently and I was really looking for a good opportunity to make some nice images. It always seemed that I was in a rush as I passed by and never had time to stop. I finally made an opportunity to stop one morning just before sunrise. The soft morning light was amazing and I could have spent hours there if the lighting conditions had held up longer.
Round Bales in Morning Light
I was out on a mission to capture the setting Full Moon at Sunrise when I saw these three Combine Harvesters lined up in a farm field. They really made the scene alongside the Moon.
I was actually on my to the decrepit old prairie farm in the next couple of images. This vintage farm is extremely picturesque and I’ve tried very hard to make it look good over the last few years. That’s a lot easier to do when the Full Moon drops down on top of it in the middle of an amazing sunrise!
I’m always surprised by how quickly the full moon drops. It will almost always completely disappear as soon as the sun breaks over the opposite horizon. Other times it will drop into a cloud bank on the its own side of the horizon and only partially disappear. In this case it did both. You can see the bottom edge of it flattening out in the final image, and I’m a witness to the fact that it was totally gone within a few seconds of that image being made!
