Almost On The Anniversary
What This Isn’t
The anniversary of making a photo every day for 20 years was still two days away when a reporter and photographers wanted to accompany me on one of my daily treks around Westerville.
The interview began in Uptown, a favorite haunt, but there were few photo opportunities, a common occurrence this time of the year. People are not yet ready for the shorter days and cooler temperatures and seem to be limiting themselves to big box and grocery stores prepping their kitchens and dining rooms for a Thanksgiving feast.
I thought that Kevin Scott, the farmer who works the fields commonly called Braun Farm, would be attempting to harvest as many soybeans as possible during a brief period when rain that had kept the field and the beans too wet for harvest had stopped for several days.
That became the photo subject for My Final Photo for November 13, 2024.
The Dispatch story and video capture the series of choices I made to get the photo well.
The photo above was made with my Nikon Z50, a cropped-sensor digital camera. The lens is a Nikon F-mount 300mm f4 attached to the Z50 with an FTX adapter that fully connects the electronics of the lens to the Z series of cameras. I used the Z50 specifically because it changed the 300mm to a 450mm angle of view, increasing the magnification factor for a longer telephoto effect.
This photo was made when Scott made a second pass through the field going east. The first pass put the combine in a position where the tree limbs obscured the grain chute, disturbing the composition enough that I waited for another opportunity.
About two minutes into The Dispatch video, I explained how I used the tree in the foreground as a framing object and to eliminate the background as a distraction element. If the tree weren’t included in the composition, the photo would have been very two-dimensional, and the background would have been too busy.
The motor drive was set to Continuous H* (extended), which uses the electronic shutter, raising the frames-per-second to 11 from the normal 5.
ISO setting was 800. The shutter speed was 1/160th. Aperture set to f4.
Edited in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. Toned and sharpened in ON1 Photo RAW 2025.
The 20th anniversary of My Final Photo happened two days later. That’s another story.
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