The Farm

My parents live on 40 acres west of Parsons, Kan., that used to be part of a larger working farm. There are several sheds, silos and whatnot still on the property, including this old-time chicken coop. This is the kind of coop that Foghorn Leghorn guarded in the old cartoons. The outside has great peeling paint and deteriorating wood. The kind of stuff we amateur photographers like to take pichurs of. I set up a couple of flashes inside so the ceiling and back wall of the coop would be visible.

On Saturday evening, Dad and I went to one of the ponds on the place to do a little fishing. See the Fish On! post for more on that. On the way back to the house I noticed the setting sun was making the seed heads on a big patch of grass glow like they were radioactive. I headed back down there the next night to shoot the glowing grass, but it was kind of cloudy so the sun wasn’t as bright and the grass heads didn’t glow. Or maybe my mind played tricks on me the night before. At any rate, I did find this lone wild sunflower nearby. I used the Strobist sunset-as-a-backdrop technique and lit the flower by holding my SB-26 flash out to camera left and fired it using the built-in optical slave triggered by the pop-up flash on my camera. I think the pop-up even provided a little fill from the front. Sunflower. Setting sun. Get it?

I wanted to shoot these black-eyed susans with a slow shutter speed to get them whipping blurrily in the wind. The wind wasn’t blowing that hard and I didn’t have my tripod with me, so that didn’t work out so well. I did some photoshopping to the shot to give it a more arty feel. Does it feel arty?

The farm offers plenty of room to roam for a little girl and her plastic tricycle.

After we got home on Monday, Gina, Abby and I went over to Braum’s for a little ice cream break. Abby said she wanted blue ice cream in a cup. She checked out the many ice cream containers and couldn’t find any blue so she opted for the orange … in a cone. She’s like the weather. if you don’t like what she proposes, just wait a minute and she’ll change her mind.