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After the Harvest, Barton Farm, version 2.3

It has been some while since I last published any joiners. The problem, as ever, is one of time. To take the photos for a joiner can take a good hour or so, and the managing, editing and composing of the completed image can take an hour or two further. I have a couple of picture sets that have been waiting to be assembled since January. After a tiring day at work I rarely have inclination to spend another couple of hours in front of a computer monitor, and so this work remains unfinished.

I have taken this week off work and had some time to get out and back to what I enjoy doing. A few days ago I cycled over to nearby Barton Farm to take some specifically to make joiner. For some while now I have wanted to make a joiner about the harvest. The wet weather this summer has meant that it has been delayed by some three or four weeks compared to normal years. This gave me some hope that I could photograph a full field, but as I rode up the farm track a tractor and trailer came charging towards me and I know that I was too late. Never mind; it was a lovely warm evening and so time to change plan and see what I could make of the cropped field.

In these pictures I initially wanted to show a few remaining stalks of barley and some wild flowers in a simple still movie type grid, and shot accordingly. All of the constituent cells were taken on my Olympus 45/f1.8 micro fourth thirds lens, at pretty much full aperture. For me, joiners are all about the experience of looking, the sensation of seeing individual components that make up the picture. It seems perfectly natural for some of this to be in focus and other parts not when viewing and this is why I want to photograph with shallow depth of field to reproduce this effect. 

After the Harvest, Barton Farm, version 2.1

When it came to editing, the transition from remaining plants and cropped stalks looked too severe, so I think the first picture presented here probably works the best. The second and third pictures are included to give you some idea of how the editing process works. These joiners were edited and composited in Lightroom4, which is an efficient and simple way to build a regular joiner, even if it does have some deficiencies. More about that technique in a future post.

After the Harvest, Barton Farm, version 2.2

It felt good to be out making pictures again, and quickly turning them into finished edits. There has been too much thinking, reading and organising around photography recently, and not enough doing. It’s the pictures that matter.