We are now well into autumn here in Cornwall. Summer has been and gone, the nights are drawing in, the weather is wet and mild, and there will now be less time for taking photographs but more dark evenings for printing them. Which is perhaps a good thing, because I am certainly well behind with my editing and printing. Not that autumn and winter are poor seasons for making pictures, of course – if we get a fine day, then I prefer the low angle of the sun at this time of year to high summer for almost any kind of landscape work. The problem is one of opportunity – now, when I get home from work it is getting dark, so no more evening shoots, and of course the bad weather almost always coincides with the weekends and my free time.
The three pictures here are a small part of a series I have been working on recently, and the overall theme is the “Farming Year”, specifically the agricultural year as it is today in Cornwall and even more specifically in my own parish. The end use might be an article for a local magazine, or perhaps a small display in our village hall, who knows. So here we have bales of barley straw (which will be used as deep-litter in the dairy herd’s winter quarters), a field of kale which will be winter fodder for the cows, and contractors hauling the maincrop potato harvest. The photos were taken with my Hasselblad 500 C/M, CFV-39 digital back, and the 80mm and 60mm lenses.
I have always carefully avoided ever even thinking about taking a “round-bale” shot in the past. It is such a ghastly, overdone routine subject, and we see them over and over again in the local press. But to complete my series on the barley harvest I couldn’t really avoid dealing with the end product, so I have done my best with it – it does have quite a nice sky. The problem which faces us as photographers is the familiar – if the subject of the picture is not of itself extraordinary or compelling, but in fact somewhat quotidian, how then do we make a good picture. Or in simple terms, how do you make a field of kale interesting? And the answer, of course, is an obvious one, but very hard to put into practice – good use of light, form, and composition. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether or not I succeeded.
John