3 Quarters Today

My Life, my photography, my passions

midwest

#16/52: My Favorite Country Barn, Edited with Lightroom

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I love country barns  (okay, it’s really a corn crib) in Nebraska is one of my favorite photography subjects, yet this shot is my favorite. I pass it at least twice a day and it sits in the middle of a field with nothing around it, solitary, no trees, just in the middle of a field with either corn or soybeans growing on all sides. It has different moods depending on the light and looks different in the early morning and at night with the sun setting behind the western sky.

My favorite barn gets my attention every time I drive past and have often taken photographs to capture the mode. They never come out exactly how it looks in real life though. But with the help of Adobe Lightroom this has changed, I can actually say that this is truly what the barn looked like that day.

Photographing Country barns
Barn against a Cloudy Sky

From what I understand in reading various photography blogs and sites a camera has difficulty collecting all the dynamic ranges of lights and darks. In simple terms you expose for the sky or your subject. That leaves the other parts of you picture over or under exposed.

The newest version of Lightroom 4 has an amazing capability of pulling out shadows, highlights, whites and blacks without leaving artifacts in the image. This was shot in RAW and I’m very impressed, puts my Photoshop CS2 to shame. The later versions of Photoshop do have more advanced algorithms that achieve the same thing, but I can only compare the programs I use.

I will still keep using Photoshop, Lightroom is only another tool to use and does not have text or graphic design capability. I still love adding drop shadows, borders and creating custom layouts.

Stay tuned for more Lightroom 4 examples, and possibly redo’s of previous photos as a comparison.

More Historic Country Barns

Barns of New York: Rural Architecture of the Empire StateBarn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail MovementBarn Find Road Trip: 3 Guys, 14 Days and 1000 Lost Collector Cars DiscoveredThe Barn: Memoir of a Family during the Nazi Occupation of Holland in 1940-1945

Country Roads and Friday Finds – Keeping With The Times

A Drive in the Country, barns, country, country living, keeping with the. Later in the day I visited Star Lake and ran into this fellow who was pretty much minding his own (business) … A Drive in the Country, barns, country, …

Barns along Polling Station Road | Hoof Beats and Foot Prints

Drive along with me on a windy country road. Polling Station Road in Harwood, Maryland offers views of a variety of country barns. Most of them from a past era of tobacco farming in southern Maryland and stand in the …

D.L. Marriott » Blog Archive » Living in a Fairy Tale

It draws up images of pumpkins and scare crows, hay bales and country barns framed in russet leaves. I grew up in the city, and although my husband and I have spent all our child raising years in the suburbs, pretty far out in …

#5/52: Snow Storm in Nebraska

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Snow in Nebraska

When it snows in Nebraska, it really snows. When the wind stops blowing, the snow settles into the trees, and the sun comes out the countryside is a magnificant site. If it is a wet spring snow it sticks to everything, covering the trees, and making for more photo opportunities than I could choose from, so here are a few more from rural Nebraska.

I always am looking for a good excuse to drive around the country, test out my camera and snow is a good opportunity to learn more about white balance and how to get true whites during snow and not blue.

Right now I’m just going to post the results. All of the photos are SOOC (straight out of camera) with the exception of the top photo, the greenish tinge just kept bugging me so I adjusted the white balance in a levels layer.

Nebraska snowy creek
Nebraska snowy creek
Snowy Farm Tires
Snow covered farm equipment
Minimum maintenance road in Nebraksa
Go Down this road at your own risk

Day 122/365: Windpower, Past and Present

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OnOne Effects: Graduated Blue and Magic Hour
Wind power today and yesterday
Photo REDO with Lightroom 4 (more realistic to what I really saw)
Windmills and Wind Farm SOOC
Windmills and Wind Farm SOOC

The world has come full circle in it’s use of energy. Harnessing wind power was used for hundreds of years as evidenced by this windmill in the foreground used to pump water into a livestock tank.  In the back are modern wind turbines in Western Iowa.

Iowa leads the United States in wind energy, more than 15% of the electrical power is generated by 47 wind farms across the state. This particular farm is part of the Adair Wind Farm. Don’t let the distance fool you, these modern wind turbines are huge. The base at the bottom is fifty feet in diameter and they stand 263 feet tall with each turbine being 126 feet in length.

Massive and impressive. Many people think they are eyesores to the landscape. Personally I find them graceful, serene, and peaceful from a distance, the rotating blades create a hypnotizing effect with their consistent rhythm. But then I don’t live right next to them either.

UPDATE:

7/2012: Second image was processed using Lightroom 4. As I’m going through my old photos I now have the tools to improve them and thought I would repost a few blog articles. 

Thanks for the suggestion Victoria, I had forgotten about the graduated blue action on the OnOne software.

Day 212/365: Nebraska Big Sky Country

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Took me three times as long to get to my sons baseball game the other night because I kept pulling over and taking sunset pictures. The clouds had that “silver lining” effect and the beams of sunlight were just to magnificent to pass up. The barn is one I pass every day between Elmwood and Murdock Nebraska. Just about every time it looks different. How can people say it’s boring scenery in Nebraska?

Nebraksa Big Sky Country
Nebraksa Big Sky Country

I grew up in Connecticut, and the trees line every roadside and curve into the clouds. Only sections of sky peak through. Although I miss the trees and hills the openness of the sky and heavens take my breath away. It’s awe inspiring to watch storms roll in, uninterrupted rainbows and a horizon that stretches thirty miles or more into the distance.

Enjoy our little bit of  “Big Sky” country in Nebraska.

Day 211/365: Nebraska Sunsets, Country Skyscrapers

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Montana might be called “Big Sky” country but Nebraska has a little bit of sky too. We also have skyscrapers. They are grain elevators and water towers. See, they touch the sky. From this vantage point they almost touch the clouds.

Sunset Over the Country High Rises
Sunset Over the Country High Rises

I am very blessed to have scenery like this every day when I commute to work. The town of Murdock (part of the Elmwood-Murdock metropolitan) has a population of approximately 280 people and yet it has home town pride. A lot of people around here are farmers, as you can tell by the grain elevator on the left. However, it is located only thirty minutes from Omaha and more and more people drive to the city to work.

The number of hogs and cattle raised in the area has drastically declined in the past twenty years. The second “skyscraper” you see it the feed mill, which is no longer in operation. I used to work there in the early 1990’s. It was then called Greenwood Farmers Co-op and due to the competitiveness of the agriculture industry more cooperatives in the state merged together to form Midwest Farmers Co-op. I believe the feed mill is further south now in Syracuse.

So do you still think skyscrapers are only in the big city?