Posts

Hearn Farms

Monday, Aug. 23 at nightfall on my aunt and uncle’s farm out in southern Kansas, Stafford County to be precise. This is in the feedlot area with the moon coming up on the horizon. Back in April, hours before BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig famously blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, I took this photo standing just a few dozen yards away with a view of this John Deere implement in action.

I heard later on there was a bobcat prowling the area earlier that night, which I guess would have been fun to come across while getting photos. I don’t know if bobcats would find tripods all that intimidating.

Pastures outside Preston, Kansas

Photo taken this past Sunday evening. I see here in August the moon rises at just the right time for a certain dramatic effect. I was in Preston, Kansas, a tiny, and regrettably foundering town of which I have some ties to. I stop there every once in a while when I’m visiting my grandmother who now lives in Stafford, roughly twenty miles to the north.

This photo is different than my normal in a few ways. I deactivated the telephoto lens’s auto-focus and manually trained it on the moon, allowing everything else to blur, including the foliage. I took several varied exposures for HDR to display the very subtle differences to be seen in color and contrast across parts of the photo. Actually I do that kind of thing frequently, but manually focusing on blissful, pastoral country settings take a bit of getting accustomed to for me. Normally I leave the serene nature photography to people who have more practice at it. I imagine those photographers are of a more serene and content personal nature in general as well. It makes one wonder.