April 2012


Ups and Downs of the Week

Baseball – Even though the Sox lost their opener, it’s still good to have baseball back.

New Tripod – I finally bought my own tripod. This is a Manfrotto 055XPROB Pro Tripod. Two things I love about this tripod: one, when it’s fully extended, the camera is just a bit above my head, so if I want to shoot sky images (moon, stars, etc) I don’t have to be sitting down or trying to twist into odd positions to see the Live View screen, and two, the center arm extends outward so the camera can be suspended over objects on the ground, like flowers and such. It also has nice, quick release leg locks. My old tripod (which actually belongs to the university) had clunky, slow thumb screw leg locks.

Tripod

Tripod

Two projects started this week. One short term, one long. And today they intertwined. I’m on Week 2 of one-lens-per-week. This week it’s the 10-22 that won’t be leaving the camera (except for tomorrow morning when I have to shoot the Class of 2012 pic). The second project is longer term. I’ve shot tons of harvest pics and a few pics of the crops earlier in the year, but this year I want to follow one crop from planting to harvesting and maybe even into silage. I stopped and talked to a farmer today (Thanks, Jeff!) who agreed to let me shoot his field of corn and his machinery. Today he was readying the planter. These things have lots of wheels and they all have to track straight so the corn grows in neat rows. He was adjusting the auto-steering on his planter when I stopped by. My hope is that I can document the life cycle of this field of corn *and* make it halfway interesting (which will be the real challenge here). I need to find a way to take something besides snapshots of corn because that would be as boring as, well…..watching corn grow. So here is the planting of the seeds. In a few weeks there will be corn shoots poking up and I’ll return to this field to document it.

Cornfield- The Beginning

Cornfield- The Beginning

Cornfield- The Beginning

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