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.
