By Kurt Lawton, owner of Stellar Content, First Place Unpublished Photo Category Award Winner
*Editor’s Note: This article is part of the “Story Behind the Photo” series featuring first place 2018 AAEA Communication award winners.
It was early October on the central Iowa farm of my youth. I had talked to my brother Tom a day earlier to get his take on local weather and current field location before I loaded the camera gear and drove four hours south from Minneapolis. My goal was to refresh my stock photo files, without impeding harvest progress.
I arrived mid-afternoon and began shooting general crop and harvest photos while catching up with my cousin who was driving truck, waiting for a fill. There was a slight cold wind, causing the dust spewed by the combine to hang for a while in the air. I was thankful for two camera bodies, so I didn’t have to change lenses and risk dust getting inside.
On almost all my farm shoots I carry a Nikon D7200 with a Nikkor 28-300mm lens and a Nikon D7100 with a Tokina 12-24mm lens. While it’s hectic at times juggling two cameras, it gives me the freedom I want to capture just about any image during the hectic pace of harvest.
While I made numerous other images from this shoot that were published, this image remained in the file until I decided to enter it in the Unpublished category, which I had never entered before.
What drew me to this image was the farmer on his cell phone, who appears rather small–but important–in the sunset horizon, given the juxtaposition of the large combine in the foreground dumping a load into the grain cart.
It was one of those grabbed images, as I had just jumped down from shooting atop the semi-trailer. As I looked up, I saw the farmer, my cousin, walking toward the tractor, then stopped to answer a phone call. It was at that moment that I grabbed my wide-angle, spun the telephoto ring to 12mm to get the entire scene, and squeezed off three images before he moved and the grain auger emptied. It was shot at 1/60 sec at f4. It’s not as tack-sharp as I like, and I wish I had switched to RAW to recover more of the sky, but all in all I was happy with harvest scenic. I guess the judges were, too.