Fields of Gold

Sometimes a song gets stuck in my head and I end up using it as a theme.  I was flipping around the channels and landed on an old Family Guy episode where they made fun of Sting, which brought to mind his song Fields of Gold.

Living in Bakersfield, and in the middle of our 4th Heat Wave of 100+ degree weather, most fields are gold; really brown. I decided I needed to do a sunset shoot and figured that the open spaces we have would make a fitting background.

Part of my decision to shoot at sunset was based on images created by other photographers, specifically Canon shooters.  There is something distinctly different about how the Canon Sensor renders colors.  So this shoot would allow me to showcase our lovely landscape and also provide me with some images I could tweak in an attempt to give them a "Canon" feel.

So you might think, "Why buy Nikon if you want your images to look like Canon?"  My response is, "Because I can?"  Seriously I have no definitive answer, aside from just plain curiosity.

Earlier in the week I helped Drew's friend Mystery photograph a friend of hers, and during the shoot she asked if we could work together, but with her in front of the camera.  We picked Sunday, which worked out since my buddy, Brian, had a shoot planned for Saturday using the same locale.

I met Brian at the location around 6:45 PM, Saturday, just as the sun was beginning it's descent, and took a couple "test" shots of Michaela.  All Manual settings and at times Manual Focus, too.  I believe the settings were f/1.8, 1/250, ISO 100, which was close enough to what I wanted; an overexposed image.

Fast forward to Sunday 6:45 PM, Brian came out with me to photograph Mystery in the 104 degree heat. I brought my 86" PLM with the Front Diffusion Panel, an Einstein 640WS Strobe, my Manfrotto Combi-Boom and a Vagabond II Battery.  As we were setting up the PLM, which has a Silver Reflective interior, we pointed it toward the setting sun.  As I walked across the front of the PLM, I could feel the heat being bounced off of it, WOW!!!  I could nuke a passing bird if I aimed it correctly.  We then covered it with the Diffusion panel which eliminated the heat and minimized the swaying due to the evening breeze.

I shot with Available light for the first 40 minutes and then switched on the Einstein Strobe for the dusk images.  I brought the Einstein strobe because it can go from Full Power down to 1/256th Power and as you have to work fast in keeping the balance between Flash and Ambient, you need to back off your Flash Power.

We finally called it quits after another 20 minutes, packed up the gear and headed home.  We were going to head Downtown for a theme change, but decided it was a school night and I was anxious to see if I achieved what I set out to do.

The images came out as I expected, a bit overexposed, but without any loss of detail.

I opened the images in my Photo Editing software, did my usual adjustments with the exception of adding two more steps, actually filters. One filter creates a brownish tone on the shadows and the other creates a yellowish tone on the highlights.  That was it, a quick shoot and quick editing.

What did I learn?

• Work on Manual Focusing - the second image above is blurry because Auto Focus (A/F) struggles when facing into the sun and also because the subject was moving.  It's definitely a skill I used to have back in college, but have become reliant on A/F.

I'm okay with the results, not ecstatic by any means, but I had a fun time shooting with Mystery and trying to evoke a soft and dreamy feeling.  By the way, this was Mystery's first photo shoot and she did really well.  Hopefully we'll shoot together soon, but first I have a Boudoir shoot coming up at Studio in the RAW.

Thanks for reading my blog...

"So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold"