Now Just Wait A Cotton Pickin' Minute!

It is cotton picking time. From a JPEG using the Nostalgic Negative film simulation. (click to enlarge)
Fujifilm X-T5; 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 28mm; 1/125th sec. @ f/8; ISO 500

I'm not sure how it happened.  I've driven by this barn a couple of hundred times over the past few years and, evidently, I mentally ignored it.  I just 'saw' it last week!  How could I have not seen it before?

As much as I've written advising keeping your photographic eyes wide open anytime you are out and about, I totally missed this barn and cotton field.  Even last week I wrote (here) about stepping out of my house and seeing a beautiful scene right in my back yard.  I felt most people would have just gotten into their automobiles and missed the beautiful morning light.

This barn sits adjacent to a main road and about 100 yards past an intersection with a traffic light.  Whether I had been stopped at the traffic light and then accelerated to speed or had a green light and buzzed by, I never really noticed this barn.  What made me notice it the other day was the cotton field ready for harvest.  I just happened to glance to my right and, surprise, there it was!

Since I was on my way to a doctor's appointment, I couldn't stop immediately and photograph it.  However, I knew I would go back and make some images but when the light was right.  After arriving at the doctor's office and while sitting in the waiting room, I brought up The Photographer's Ephemeris on my phone to find out from which directions the light would come throughout the day and when the best light would be on the barn and field.  It turned out that late in the afternoon just before sunset the warm light would hit the barn front at about a 30 degree angle.  Perfect.  I then planned to go back an hour before sunset, scout out the area on foot and make some photographs.  That is what I did.

As the sun set, I decided to make a few exposures in that direction as well.  This is an example where
the JPEG just couldn't get the job done.  I had to use the raw file.  The JPEG created some banding
in the sky due to it being only 8-bit color versus 14-bit for a raw file. (click to enlarge)
X-T5; 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 36mm; 1/420th sec. @ f/11; ISO 500

Later that day, I grabbed my Fujifilm gear (why did I pick Fujifilm rather than the OM-1 gear?) and drove to the location of the barn and cotton field.  From there I walked the perimeter of the field looking at the light, the rows and patterns of cotton plants, the adjacent buildings and decided on a course of action.  The images I had in mind wouldn't be portfolio worthy, but they should be pleasing to the eye.

Over the next hour, I made several photographs of the barn and field from a variety of angles, some with everything in focus from front to back, some with the foreground blurred, some with a wide-angle focal lengths, some with normal and short telephoto focal lengths.  As the light became warmer and warmer nearing sunset, I continued to make photographs.  I was trying to capture this subject in several different ways for several different 'looks.'

I've included a few of the images here.  But the question still haunts me.  How could have I overlooked this old barn and cotton field for the past couple of years?  Is it possible I was actually paying attention to where I was driving?  Did I have my eyes on the road?  lol!

Answering the question above, the reasons I took my Fujifilm gear were a) I wanted to maximize detail and the X-T5 has 40.2mp, b) I had a specific idea as to how I wanted my resulting photos to look and the X-T5 is the easiest to manually set to a very specific set of settings and c) I planned on using the Nostalgic Negative film simulation (for JPEGs) to better capture the feeling of the warm light from the setting sun.

For those of you interested in the technical aspects of my X-T5’s settings, I set the camera to raw + JPEG, Nostalgic Negative film simulation, a daylight white balance so auto white balance didn’t neutralize the light and to keep the warm light warm;  aperture priority as the depth of field was the variable I most wanted to control, ISO to the X-T5’s base of 125 and manual focus with focus peaking to actually see the depth of field (this worked very well).  Just before sunset, I raised my ISO to 500 to keep my shutter speed high enough so as to not risk blurred images from camera shake (I needn’t have worried as the IBIS was excellent!).  By the way ISO is the setting where the dual gain sensor/image processor kicks in and has less noise, etc. than slightly lower ISOs.

Also, for you camera phone fans, I even made some images with my iPhone 14 Pro Max.  Here is one of the iPhone images.

iPhone 14 Pro Max JPEG (click to enlarge)

Lesson Learned:  I need to better practice what I preach!

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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