The Scottish Highlands and all those epic landscapes are within a 30 minute drive from where I live, in rural Perthshire, yet I find myself drawn to much less typically epic scenes these days. Everyday since I moved here, I’ve found myself drawn to the rolling farmland and work of the farmers that is seemingly going on all around us. I’m not from a farming background, but I often catch myself humbled and impressed by these unsung heroes, feeding the country.
There is one particular field that keeps catching my eye, and I keep saying out loud to Sofia, on her school run, I must bring my camera and photograph that field. She will be relieved that today, after weeks of saying this to her, I finally took my camera out and captured it.
This particular field is full of bales of hay, all rolled up tightly and strewn across the landscape for as far as the eye can see. From my vantage point, the bales spread out towards and onto a gently sloping hill. The combination of the land’s natural beauty along with the geometric man-made shapes covering it get my creative juices flowing. It’s a veritable playground of compositional possibilities. Fortunately, the sun came out on this, the last day of August, and the farmers were kind enough to have not removed all the hay.
Recording the land in Perthshire, whether its natural beauty or the way in which man works with it, is part of an ongoing project of mine to document ‘The Land’.
Now I know that a lot of people will say that photos should be edited to within an inch of perfection, but I’m going to be brutally honest now and say, I really don’t enjoy spending any more time than I have to editing photos. For me, the joy is in seeing, not in tweaking. So these photos are all straight out of camera black and whites from my Nikon Z8 set to the Monochrome profile. I retain the raw files too, just in case one of the JPEGs doesn’t cut it, but in this case, I got the exposure pretty close in camera and simply adjusted the endpoints and cropped some shots to a 16:9 aspect ratio where I felt it worked best.
