Dramatic prairie sky's darken as a storm breaks over a field of wheat. Canon EOS 7D EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm f/9 1/60 ISO 100
My wheels hum down the open highway as the wide prairie spaces open up in front of me. This place has been called empty but for me it is not empty, it is open. There is a beauty in the openness that invites you to examine yourself rather than overwhelm you with the ‘other’ that surrounds you. There is space to breath and think. The prairies are like the rest between the notes, the pause in the well crafted sentence, the negative space that defines the image. They are the place where we can understand the rest of our lives because for the moment we can consider the rest of our lives with spaces for the thoughts to breath.
One more from my trip to the prairies. I went out for a bike ride in the early morning and as I got closer to home the wind started to whip up and the sky started to darken in the south. I love a dramatic prairie sky over a sunlit wheat field and I went back out with my car to find the right angle under the right sky. I got this image but I knew that I had to do some work on it. The sensor on my 7D does not have the dynamic range to cover the variation in light and darkness in the image. I exposed for the highlights and then went to work on the image in Aperture. I really liked the ‘U’ shaped ring of dramatic clouds so I emphasized this by brushing in more contrast to the edges of the ‘U’ where they bordered the softer clouds. I then darkened the softer clouds in the middle of the frame near the horizon line. Next was the wheat. I painted in light with the dodge tool in Aperture and then added saturation to the yellow-greens of the wheat. I was quite happy with the drama that resulted.
-Russell Berg