Over last few days, actually last weekend plus Monday I added close to 2000 km, driving to Poland and around Silesia with my JBModel stand. This is the reason for less activity on the blog and websites.
On the way back to Vienna, right after Czech border I noticed few pumpkin fields and they reminded me of coming Autumn. While driving along the fields I thought I would have to come back to the place to take some shots. It took me few days to organize myself including clearing out shop stuff. Finally today I found time to come back to the location and to my joy the weather also played correct tune.
Nice thick clouds and forecasted rain. Then you think, deep grey world around you with decent orange and green pumpkins - they must pop out of the images with their contrast colours and zero harsh light. Lower Austria (Niederösterreich) is not really the land for pumpkins comparing to Styria (Steiermark) but you can still find some pieces here and there.
This was really one of last moments around here to shoot pumpkins on the ground, on most fields they were already cleaned from leaves and sorted in rows ready for collection. I found only spot were the still laid around in natural manner. But leaves and branches were already dry.
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| Pumpkins ready for collection, Lower Austria, Drasenhofen area. 16mm, f22, 0.3 sec, ISO100, |
I was after composition with cloudy sky and big pumpkins. This implied to get really low on the ground and use wide angle. To shoot picture above I sat down literally about 50 cm away from the biggest pumpkin and camera was maybe 10 cm above the field. Of course wanted to use widest angle as possible from what I had - 16mm. There was no sun and the scene was more or less balanced so there was no worry about clipping lights but I wanted to really get the most of the clouds. I have setup the composition and set exposure for the foreground and then mounted 3 stops grey filter, adjusted shutter speed to compensate for less light, and placed 2 stops nd hard grad. I used maximum aperture f22 to get the as much depth of field as possible and set te focus manually to 1m. Graduated filter really brought back all details from this cloudy sky scene. Grey filter allowed me to blur moving tractor. I saw the guy working nearby and waited until he came close. Tractor brings some extra life to the picture. Something is happening there.
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| Pumpkins ready for collection, Lower Austria, Drasenhofen area. 200mm, f5.6, 1/200 sec, ISO200, |
I wanted also only some colours and close-up shots. Put 200mm lens on and physically lay down on the ground to get pumpkin's point of view. I found this one weed that still looked healthy and stuck out vertically. This built my composition. Set f to 5.6 to have moderate depth of field. I wanted to make sure the weed and the pumpkin are sharp and the rest blur out. I am happy with this hand held shot.
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| Pumpkins ready for collection, Lower Austria, Drasenhofen area. 145mm, f32, 1 sec, ISO200, |
I shot few other pictures in two different locations, tested vertical and horizontal compositions. First location looked nice but you could see too much human interference.
I was after something more natural. I found one place where everything was still left untouched. I still had my 200mm lens and continued on close-up shots.
This time however I was using tripod. Being so close to subject and with 200 mm focal length depth of field becomes really narrow. I closed down to maximum f32 but that implied 1 second exposure. In the picture to the right I manually focused on second pumpkin. Using camera's focus preview button I made sure the pumpkin in very front is also in focus.
Longer focal length slightly compressed the perspective, in reality they were a little bit further away from each other, you can see the difference on the 16mm wide angle shot below.
Again I sat on the ground - make sure you are properly dressed and you do not care about getting dirty and wet. It started to rain already. So I had to keep wiping out front element in between every shot.
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| Pumpkins ready for collection, Lower Austria, Drasenhofen area. 16mm, f22, 3.2 sec, ISO100, |
Here I wanted to capture pumpkins naturally spread around with heavy weather above them. Last days was very hot and dry thus the ground is dry and cracked. (I am sure it looked different the day after. It rained whole night.) Stalks all over create many leading lines from one pumpkin to another. I tried also horizontal composition but in this case I liked more vertical shot contrary to the shot I posted at the beginning where only panoramic view played the game. An eye travels from the pumpkin around the lines to other ones then over to sky and back.
Filters... polarizer and 2 stops soft grad in this case. I used polarizer to reduce slight light reflection of the pumpkin and it added some colour.
Here's a small extra story related to last two shots. While shooting for about 30 minutes I heard car's door slap behind me. Looked around and saw... approaching me Police guys. Great I thought, I would end up at the station explaining what I had been doing on the field. They were quite friendly simply checking what is going on and we even had small chat about photography while I was showing them the pictures on the camera screen. They only asked me not to take any pumpkins :) and drove away. So I kept shooting and then about 10 minutes later, another police car came. Guys were lazy, perhaps due to rain and did not bother getting out of the car. I showed them the camera and shouted that I was photographing... somehow they could not believe, asked me twice what I am photographing... like what the hell would you like to shoot here... I said pumpkins and weather. Finally they digested it and drove away. If it was not for really heavy rain now I might meet third police patrol. That would be something.
Autumn is coming, great photography period and am really looking forward to it. For sure will spend lots of time outside.
Cheers
Jerzy
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