Photography of Emil Kepko

A quickie post this evening. I visited Appleton Farms over the weekend, which one of the many properties held by the Trustees of Reservations. The farm has miles of hiking trails, large pastures with happy cows, and flocks of bird in every direction. I’m sure it’s fantastic in the morning. I visited in the afternoon, just for fun, and snapped off a couple of landscapes. Nothing of note, other than to remind you that for black and white, filters are your friend.

I recently joined several photography meetups in order to get out and shoot subjects I wouldn’t otherwise shoot. Today was my first such meetup, and we met at the Dunajski Dairy farm in Peabody MA for a few hours with the milking cows. There were a number of challenges to overcome. The cows themselves were cute and friendly; this wasn’t an issue of unruly models. First was sunlight. It was early afternoon, the sun was overhead, and most of the cows were indoors. The second (for me, at least) was finding decent composition. The tags in the cows’ ears I found distracting, and most of the closeups I took failed to interest me for this reason. But as I sorted through the photos I kept coming back to the same ones, and they all had one thing in common.

I’m always reminded — after I’m home and looking through my photos, of course — of the NYIP’s three guidelines: know your subject; focus attention on your subject; simplify. In this case, the subject is a dairy cow. I wasn’t around for milking (which would probably be very interesting), so I needed to focus on the cow itself, not on any ancillary event. Of all the photos I took today, I feel as if the ones that worked the best were the last 3 below. I took my camera and held it over the fence, pointed in the general vicinity of the cow, and took a shot as the cows came forward to see what was happening. These photos do, I feel, capture an important essence of the cows: curiosity. I think that is what is meant by ‘know your subject’. Cows seem to be inherently curious creatures, so focusing attention on that aspect seemed to work. Even the photo of the cow and the woman (another meetup member) and the shot of the calf capture the curiosity of the cow.

I’ll have to try harder ‘in the field’ to remember the three guidelines. They do actually work!

A nice part of shooting the same subject with different people is comparing shots. I’m curious to see how others approached the same scenes. Below are a couple of the photos that I think came out alright. Nothing spectacular; but I learned a good lesson today.

I would say 99.9% of my photos are of landscapes or animals. Anything related to nature, I’m there. I’ll throw in a building or two every now and then, but I know where my photographic heart is. In the interest of becoming a better photographer — the whole point of this blog — I extended myself to my most uncomfortable photographic subject: people. Perhaps it’s my own prejudices, but I’m often quite reluctant to shoot people, as I often feel uncomfortable with people taking my picture. I felt the lament in the Busan fish market, as I could ’see’ photos as I walked around, but often demurred on taking the photo lest I make the subject uncomfortable. I know I left some great photos in South Korea (Isn’t that a song?). The one time I did feel comfortable was at the Marblehead Festival of Arts, where I managed to overcome my hesitancy — and took some of my favorite photos of people. (Click for Full gallery)

So it is with that backdrop that I sought out the opportunity to photograph some dancers nearby. Because I was invited in, I could shoot to my heart’s content, without fear of offending or making uncomfortable anyone in the frame. In this case, the only difficulty was the environment: dark. Very dark, in fact. My lens is versatile but slow (Nikon 18-200, f/3.5-5.6), especially zoomed in. I learned from experience (i.e., my first 100 shots were blurry) that I needed to shoot at ISO 1600 , 1/60 s to stop the action. If it was dark and the action slowed, I could drop to 1/40 s. So I shot in shutter priority mode (the best!) and ended up with some very grainy, dark pictures that I edited in Aperture and Dfine (to remove noise).

In the end, I feel I ended up with some decent photos - mostly of poses. The dancers were happy, which goes a long way towards making me feel I did my job. My favorite shots are zoomed in, which meant I missed a lot of action elsewhere. But it’s becoming more apparent as I practice that you can’t get every shot. Just sit and wait, and anticipate, and eventually the shot you’re looking for will dance into view.

The Lupine Festival is not so much a ‘festival’ as several fields of Lupine and other spring mountain flowers. I’m not sure how much traffic comes through, but the day I went there were only 2 other people — another photographer and a painter.

The first thing that draws you in is the shear vastness of the Lupine fields - There must be thousands of them. Unfortunately, this beauty does not come through in the photos. As you can see, many of the wide-angle photos look rather bland, especially of the purple lupine. So the close-ups were the best, and close-ups that were lit from the side turned out best. Of course, part of the problem is I was there at noon, during the harshest light.

This gallery contains photos from the 2007 festival. I hope to make it up again this year - preferably with morning light.