On a recent outing, I was driving through the fields and cropland that surround the small town of Keo, Arkansas, when I came across this scene. Typically, this is something I would have driven by and paid absolutely no attention to. But, what would have been a boring subject under normal conditions turned into an interesting photograph under the conditions I had that day.
I woke up that morning to cloudy skies and thought about staying home, but I quickly reconsidered that decision, loaded up my gear, and headed out. As I arrived in Keo, the clouds would begin to break up, light would filter through, and then the clouds would reform. It was certainly a dynamic lighting situation.
Driving by a field on the outskirts of the town, a few breaks in the clouds again allowed the sun to peek through, and the combination of light and clouds allowed a series of highlights and shadows to form across the field creating a very abstract scene.
I quickly stopped my truck, got out, and set up my camera. But, I found that the lines of light and shadow that had attracted my attention were not as prominent from the ground as I had expected; I needed to be higher to photograph the scene as I envisioned it. My only choice was to climb into the bed of my truck, which was exactly what I did. During all of this, I did not anticipate how hard the wind was blowing, and it was a cold wind, too.
The closest part of the scene was about 50 feet away while the farthest section was several hundred feet away. A focal length of 300mm provided the framing I wanted, but it didn’t provide enough depth of field to ensure the entire scene was sharp in one image. The only way to ensure complete sharpness was to take a series of three images focusing on the foreground, then the midground, and finally the background and combine the three files into a single picture.
The wind created one more challenge. Viewing the scene on the back of my camera, I saw just how much the wind was affecting the image and causing it to jump around a bit. To mitigate that issue, I raised the ISO to 1600, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second at an aperture of f/25. I also tried to stand in a position that at least partially blocked the amount of wind directly hitting the camera.
Combining the three images in Photoshop and making some additional adjustments to further emphasize the highlights and shadows created this abstract, monochromatic photograph. It would never have happened if the lighting conditions were different than what they were, and I would never have discovered this scene if I had reconsidered my original decision to stay home.