Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens...and other lenses too.

After weeks of photos featuring airplanes and wind turbines, this image is much more simple and also serves as the final shot in this series of photos from my trip to Nebraska. This was also, fittingly, the last thing I shot before putting my camera gear away and just focusing on getting back home. I think this was off of Highway 77 but I don’t remember exactly, though it was definitely somewhere in Kansas. From a compositional perspective this is about as simple as you can possibly get: the windmill lining up on the left third of the image, and the grass exactly filling the bottom third. There’s a clear subject, a sense of perspective with the grass in the foreground blurred out due to depth of field, and a wide open sky on the right side. No clouds, no birds, no trees, just a simple shot of a windmill on the prairie. And I like it that way.

While I appreciate the sheer size of the metal wind turbines so prominent across the midwest, there’s something special about a simple windmill–rusty after years of being blasted by the elements–sitting in a grassy field against a deep blue sky that seems distinctly Middle American. This image could have been taken 100 years ago and it would look almost the same, and hopefully 100 years from now this windmill will still be here for future generations to consider.

I shot this with my Nikon D500, 70-200 f/2.8 lens, at 200mm with an aperture of f/2.8. Is that lens overkill for such a photo? Maybe, but then again, without the f/2.8 aperture it wouldn’t have the delicious foreground blur that helps you feel like you are part of the photo. Shooting this was a good way of going back to basics, so to speak, and using fancy gear to take a very simple but very effective picture. I hope I can stop and see this windmill again on my next trip to Nebraska, and hopefully people will still see it standing tall for years to come.

If you’re tired of wind turbine photos, don’t worry: this is the final one I plan on posting. Maybe. Hopefully. Who knows. In any case, here’s yet another photo of the Kansas prairie and some wind turbines, but just like the others I have shared recently, this one is distinctly different in a way that I haven’t yet been able to photograph until now.

In a way this isn’t a picture of wind turbines or hay bales or anything like that. It’s a picture of scale. It’s meant to display the vastness of the rolling hills in Kansas, in a way that you can’t really get without something in the foreground and something else way in the background. Out west you can get these kinds of shots with mountains in the background that clearly conveys a sense of scale, but what do you do when you trade high peaks for open blue skies? Simple: find something else to use instead.

I shot this on my Nikon D500 at 200mm on my 70-200 f/2.8 lens, with the aperture set to f/8. I tried a wider aperture but the wind turbines in the distance were too fuzzy to even tell what they were, and f/8 gave me just the right combination of sharpness and background blur. If you look closely though, you’ll notice something interesting about the turbines: they’re blurry, but not in the way you might expect. Rather than losing sharpness due to depth of field, the towering columns and spinning blades appear wavy and ill-defined due to the mirage effect that happens when hot air rises from the ground and causes light to bend.

I was trying to capture an image that, like some of my other recent images, shows the sheer vastness of the midwestern vistas. It’s tricky to do that with a telephoto lens, but I think this picture does a pretty decent job due to the compositional elements of foreground and background. At the lower portion of the photo you can see hay bales receding into the distance, followed by rolling hills and then two layers of wind turbines: the two in the middle are closer and the two on the edges are father away. It all comes together to form an image that slowly recedes away from the viewer and, in doing so, helps illustrate just how big this scene really is.

If there’s one thing I’m not happy about in this picture it’s the editing artifacts where the sky meets the ground. I darkened the sky just a bit in Lightroom to make it look more like when I actually took this picture, and there’s a bit of a white line or some kind of border as a result that seems a bit artificial. I don’t care for it, but I also don’t care enough to spend a long time tweaking the original RAW file. I’m happy with the shot as-is, and that’s good enough for me :)

One strange problem with photographing wind turbines is how to deal with the position of the blades. What position should they be in for a cool-looking picture? If you have never taken a picture like this before you might think that you would want the blades of your subject (in this case, the large turbine near the right side) to be positioned just like the one on the left: one blade straight up, and the other blades at the four- and eight-o’clock positions. Here’s the thing though…that position doesn’t convey movement. It’s weird, but it’s true. When you look at the turbine on the left it looks static and unmoving, even though in reality it was turning and churning in the breeze just like the rest. So what do you do?

You could try to invert the position of the blades such that one is straight down and the other two are at the classic 10:10 orientation, but that doesn’t work either. The result is a turbine with what appears to be only two blades since the third, the one that is straight down, isn’t immediately noticeable. This position also makes the turbine look odd and off-kilter, though I don’t exactly know why.

My best advice when shooting pictures of a three-bladed turbine is to take the shot when the blades are just like you see here: one at the 1:00 position, one at the 5:00 position, and one at the 10:00 position. (Roughly speaking, that is.) It looks like they are on the move, going places, doing things, and generating power in such a way that other positions just don’t seem to convey. Since the blades were, in fact, spinning kind of rapidly when I took this I just set my camera to rapid-shot mode, held down the shutter, and fired off about 30 images. One of them turned out great–the one you see here–and I hope it gives you even a small sense of scope and scale that I got while standing in this field by the road.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Independence Day, in no small part due to Randy Quaid’s character Russel Casse, a former fighter pilot who now spends his days piloting a crop duster and occasionally spraying the wrong field. At the end of the movie, in a move of shining heroism, he sacrifices himself to defeat the alien invaders and save the day in a scene that still gives me chills when I watch it. I like to think that in an alternate reality Mr. Casse somehow survived the explosion (maybe the aliens teleported him? Maybe he has a magical ejector seat?) and he spent the rest of his days quietly flying his single-engine crop duster somewhere in the midwest. And if so, maybe he’s piloting this very airplane you see here.

It could happen, right?

Doubtful as that scenario might be, it’s still fun to imagine. And this photo was enormously fun to take. After watching this airplane treat the sorghum field by Highway 15 in central Kansas for about ten minutes, and after getting some decent shots at high shutter speeds to freeze the action, I wanted to see if I could get some panning shots to really cap off the experience. I’ve shot plenty of panning photos of my kids on their bikes in front of my house, but never an airplane flying low over the ground like this! Since I already had plenty of photos where all the motion was frozen, I figured I might as well try a panning picture and see what I could get.

The first thing I had to do was switch over to Manual Mode. That way I could specify the aperture and shutter speed I wanted in order to get a panning picture. I shot at f/22, 1/45 second, ISO 100, and my light meter showed a pretty good exposure at those settings. Then I waited until the airplane was coming in for another pass, made sure my camera was on high-speed shooting, and held down the shutter button while I followed the plane through the viewfinder. I used single-point autofocus since the motion of the plane was entirely predictable, rattled off several dozen shots as it flew past, and then quickly reviewed my images to see if I got any that worked.

I repeated this process one or two more times and then it was time to head to my car and get back to my drive. I didn’t really bother to see if any of the shots were tack sharp since the point was kind of moot: I needed to get going, whether I got any good shots or not. A few days later as I was looking through my images in Lightroom I saw the image at the top of this post and it kind of floored me. It turned out great! The plane is almost tack sharp (but not quite, though I’m fine with what I got) and there’s a clear sense of motion as the background whips by and the cloud billows out from behind the plane. More than that is the angle of the aircraft, which I thought was really cool. It’s kind of a 3/4 view instead of full profile, and that almost makes it seem like the plane is careening through a high-speed turn, possibly being chased by Dom Toretto or one of his racing buddies. I still can’t quite believe I got this shot and it makes me smile to look at it, and think about how I could do this even better if I’m ever in this situation again.

Ok I’m going to be honest here: I don’t exactly know what’s happening in this picture. I mean, I get it on a conceptual level but I don’t know any pertinent details. This airplane, the same one from last week’s photo, is spraying a mist of…something…over a field of sorghum. Is it fertilizer? Pesticide? Who knows. (Not me, anyway) All I know for sure is this was a fun photo to take.

This started with me driving from Oklahoma to Kansas, taking small highways and back roads as much as possible in order to see the scenery and have the ability to pull over for a break whenever I want to. As I was going east on Highway 15 I saw this crop duster doing its thing over a field just south of the road, so I pulled over to snap some photos. Ok, a lot of photos. Hundreds of photos. As many as I could given the time I had available, which wasn’t exactly unlimited given that I had places to go and people to see. I used my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, zooming in and out to capture images while keeping a constant f/2.8 aperture to freeze motion and blur the background and foreground ever so slightly. Having never photographed a scene like this before I wasn’t sure it would work, but I think the results turned out great. Certainly much better than I could have expected or hoped for, especially given that I never expected to be photographing a crop duster in the first place :)

As I was going through all my photos trying to pick out my favorites, I settled on this as one of my top three for a couple of reasons. First, the 3/4 view of the plane helps show it as a three-dimensional object compared to the profile view from last week’s shot. Also, I wanted to capture a sense of just how low this airplane was flying, and once you notice its shadow on the sorghum plants you can clearly tell that it’s only a few meters off the field. Certainly not a normal situation for an airplane to be in! Finally, I of course wanted to see the trail of fertilizer (or pesticide, or whatever it is) behind the airplane which clearly convey a sense of motion and energy.

This was an incredibly fun picture to take and a good reminder about keeping your eyes open, looking for photo opportunities when they present themselves, and being prepared with the right gear to get the shot.