After a long time spent in lockdown, we went apple picking. With the warm weather still hanging around and the autumn colours just starting to creep in I decided to take my camera with me to capture the fun.
The first thing I noticed able to orchard was how beautiful and rustic everything was. My attention was drawn to a small wooden shed near the entrance to the fields. I decided to photograph it and used a shutter speed of 1/100 seconds, an ISO of 100 and, an aperture of f/9. I then used Adobe Lightroom to make the image black and white and enhance the rustic astatic of the photo.
The second image I liked most from the shoot was a small red tractor. I wanted to photograph this lower down to make sure that I was level with the side of the vehicle. For this photograph, I used a shutter speed of 1/250 seconds, an ISO of 100 and, an aperture of f/4. I wanted the image to focus on the tractor and blur out most of the background. I again used Lightroom to make the image black and white to fit the rustic theme of my series.
The final image that I selected for the series was a pile of small wooden boxes in the middle of the apple trees. For this photograph, I used a shutter speed of 1/160 second, an ISO of 100 and, an aperture of f/5. I slightly off centered the boxes in the frame to give the photo a “flawed” (not centered) look. I used Lightroom to make this image black and white while also increasing the clarity to further bring the focus onto the boxes and blur the background.
Overall, I am very pleased with the small series of photographs and love the way that they look together. I think that they really achieve the rustic theme I was going for. I wanted to do something different and use the apple trees as a backdrop rather than have them being the main focus of the images and I’m so happy I found these little gems scattered around the orchard.
