Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens...and other lenses too.

One strange problem with photographing wind turbines is how to deal with the position of the blades. What position should they be in for a cool-looking picture? If you have never taken a picture like this before you might think that you would want the blades of your subject (in this case, the large turbine near the right side) to be positioned just like the one on the left: one blade straight up, and the other blades at the four- and eight-o’clock positions. Here’s the thing though…that position doesn’t convey movement. It’s weird, but it’s true. When you look at the turbine on the left it looks static and unmoving, even though in reality it was turning and churning in the breeze just like the rest. So what do you do?

You could try to invert the position of the blades such that one is straight down and the other two are at the classic 10:10 orientation, but that doesn’t work either. The result is a turbine with what appears to be only two blades since the third, the one that is straight down, isn’t immediately noticeable. This position also makes the turbine look odd and off-kilter, though I don’t exactly know why.

My best advice when shooting pictures of a three-bladed turbine is to take the shot when the blades are just like you see here: one at the 1:00 position, one at the 5:00 position, and one at the 10:00 position. (Roughly speaking, that is.) It looks like they are on the move, going places, doing things, and generating power in such a way that other positions just don’t seem to convey. Since the blades were, in fact, spinning kind of rapidly when I took this I just set my camera to rapid-shot mode, held down the shutter, and fired off about 30 images. One of them turned out great–the one you see here–and I hope it gives you even a small sense of scope and scale that I got while standing in this field by the road.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Independence Day, in no small part due to Randy Quaid’s character Russel Casse, a former fighter pilot who now spends his days piloting a crop duster and occasionally spraying the wrong field. At the end of the movie, in a move of shining heroism, he sacrifices himself to defeat the alien invaders and save the day in a scene that still gives me chills when I watch it. I like to think that in an alternate reality Mr. Casse somehow survived the explosion (maybe the aliens teleported him? Maybe he has a magical ejector seat?) and he spent the rest of his days quietly flying his single-engine crop duster somewhere in the midwest. And if so, maybe he’s piloting this very airplane you see here.

It could happen, right?

Doubtful as that scenario might be, it’s still fun to imagine. And this photo was enormously fun to take. After watching this airplane treat the sorghum field by Highway 15 in central Kansas for about ten minutes, and after getting some decent shots at high shutter speeds to freeze the action, I wanted to see if I could get some panning shots to really cap off the experience. I’ve shot plenty of panning photos of my kids on their bikes in front of my house, but never an airplane flying low over the ground like this! Since I already had plenty of photos where all the motion was frozen, I figured I might as well try a panning picture and see what I could get.

The first thing I had to do was switch over to Manual Mode. That way I could specify the aperture and shutter speed I wanted in order to get a panning picture. I shot at f/22, 1/45 second, ISO 100, and my light meter showed a pretty good exposure at those settings. Then I waited until the airplane was coming in for another pass, made sure my camera was on high-speed shooting, and held down the shutter button while I followed the plane through the viewfinder. I used single-point autofocus since the motion of the plane was entirely predictable, rattled off several dozen shots as it flew past, and then quickly reviewed my images to see if I got any that worked.

I repeated this process one or two more times and then it was time to head to my car and get back to my drive. I didn’t really bother to see if any of the shots were tack sharp since the point was kind of moot: I needed to get going, whether I got any good shots or not. A few days later as I was looking through my images in Lightroom I saw the image at the top of this post and it kind of floored me. It turned out great! The plane is almost tack sharp (but not quite, though I’m fine with what I got) and there’s a clear sense of motion as the background whips by and the cloud billows out from behind the plane. More than that is the angle of the aircraft, which I thought was really cool. It’s kind of a 3/4 view instead of full profile, and that almost makes it seem like the plane is careening through a high-speed turn, possibly being chased by Dom Toretto or one of his racing buddies. I still can’t quite believe I got this shot and it makes me smile to look at it, and think about how I could do this even better if I’m ever in this situation again.

Ok I’m going to be honest here: I don’t exactly know what’s happening in this picture. I mean, I get it on a conceptual level but I don’t know any pertinent details. This airplane, the same one from last week’s photo, is spraying a mist of…something…over a field of sorghum. Is it fertilizer? Pesticide? Who knows. (Not me, anyway) All I know for sure is this was a fun photo to take.

This started with me driving from Oklahoma to Kansas, taking small highways and back roads as much as possible in order to see the scenery and have the ability to pull over for a break whenever I want to. As I was going east on Highway 15 I saw this crop duster doing its thing over a field just south of the road, so I pulled over to snap some photos. Ok, a lot of photos. Hundreds of photos. As many as I could given the time I had available, which wasn’t exactly unlimited given that I had places to go and people to see. I used my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, zooming in and out to capture images while keeping a constant f/2.8 aperture to freeze motion and blur the background and foreground ever so slightly. Having never photographed a scene like this before I wasn’t sure it would work, but I think the results turned out great. Certainly much better than I could have expected or hoped for, especially given that I never expected to be photographing a crop duster in the first place :)

As I was going through all my photos trying to pick out my favorites, I settled on this as one of my top three for a couple of reasons. First, the 3/4 view of the plane helps show it as a three-dimensional object compared to the profile view from last week’s shot. Also, I wanted to capture a sense of just how low this airplane was flying, and once you notice its shadow on the sorghum plants you can clearly tell that it’s only a few meters off the field. Certainly not a normal situation for an airplane to be in! Finally, I of course wanted to see the trail of fertilizer (or pesticide, or whatever it is) behind the airplane which clearly convey a sense of motion and energy.

This was an incredibly fun picture to take and a good reminder about keeping your eyes open, looking for photo opportunities when they present themselves, and being prepared with the right gear to get the shot.

I can’t recall a time when I was able to take a picture like this, and I don’t imagine I will have the opportunity again anytime soon. It also shows the importance of preparedness, and also of simply having the dumb luck to be in the right place at the right time. I shot this when I was driving along Highway 15 in the middle of Kansas, and spotted a small yellow plane flying low over a field with a cloud of fertilizer billowing out behind it. It was a crop duster! I had only seen these once or twice in my life and I was thrilled to get the chance to witness one in action up close and personal. Thankfully I brought pretty much my entire camera kit with me on this particular trip so I pulled into a driveway, got out my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and started firing away. I took hundreds of photos as this airplane went back and forth across a field of sorghum and came away with a three favorites which I will be posting here on Weekly Fifty.

I wanted to start my series with this picture even though the crop duster is barely distinguishable from any other small single-engine aircraft. If you look closely you can see a bar across the middle just below the driver’s window which sprays fertilizer, but other than that it looks like pretty much any other normal yellow airplane. What I like about this image is that it shows a scene that is pretty different from what you might expect. Here’s this yellow plane clearly aiming for the ground as if coming in for a landing, but there’s no runway in sight. A long undulating road is perpendicular to the plane and there’s also plenty of power lines to crash into, and yet, this plane is diving headlong into the greenery despite having nowhere to go. Clearly this is not a normal situation!

Though I didn’t really plan this image–it’s one of a few dozen that I fired off in rapid succession as the plane descended–I like how perfectly all the elements come together to form a compelling composition: The cloudless sky, the empty road, the red barn, the rolling hills, and the trees in the background all serve to form a scene that is distinctly Middle America. I like the profile shot of the airplane and its position at the intersection of the top third and right third of the image, and the sense of anticipation as it is on its way to fill the empty space on the left. The 1/6000 shutter speed made it possible to freeze every bit of motion while still conveying a clear sense of activity, and shooting at f/2.8 resulted in a subtle background blur as well.

I’m extraordinarily pleased at this moment of photographic serendipity, and I’m excited to show the next two images in this series as well.

Spoiler alert: Over the next few weeks you’re going to see a lot of photos of wind turbines here on Weekly Fifty. I recently drove from Oklahoma to Nebraska, having not made that trip for a while due to the pandemic, and of course I brought my camera gear with me to take some shots along the way. I really enjoy taking back roads and two-lane highways as opposed to interstates because the scenery is so much more interesting, and because you can pull over almost any time you want to take photos or just stretch your legs. And sometimes you come across a scene like this that’s just begging to be photographed.

One thing I’ve learned about taking pictures of these wind turbines is that you have to find a way to put them in context or give the audience a sense of scale. You can’t just take a snapshot of a turbine and call it a day. You have to give your viewers some way to place the subject in a physical space so they know how massive these things really are. Trouble is, it’s really tricky to actually pull that off. This photo here is one solution, and while it’s not perfect I do think it helps capture the feeling of just how tall these things tower above the fields and hills of the midwestern prairie.

There’s a couple key elements in this picture that help it be a bit more effective at conveying scale. First, the foreground. I positioned myself (along with my Nikon D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens) in such a way as to have those large round bales in the lower-left corner and slightly out of focus as well, thanks to the depth of field afforded when shooting 120mm at f/2.8. Those foreground elements give the picture a sense of depth and perspective, and without them the image would feel kind of empty.

Next, the background. While I had very little control over this, I was glad that I could capture a scene in which there were dozens of wind turbines receding away on the far side of the hill. When you see how tall the turbine in the center is, and then see many more turbines behind it, you start to get a sense for the true size of this power-generation operation. It feels like these turbines go on for miles and miles which, if you have ever seen a field like this, actually is the case. This wouldn’t happen without the downward slope behind the subject and the many turbines behind it, and it was really cool to be able to capture this in a photograph.

Finally, the subject itself. The gleaming white turbine just left of center is the one that caught my eye initially as I was driving down Highway 15. It was facing the road as well as the sun, and while I could have cropped this image to make the subject smack-dab in the center of the image, I left it just off to the side a bit so as to give the wide-open blue skies and clouds a bit of room to breathe within the frame. All in all I’m quite pleased with how this picture turned out, and if you ever get the chance to see a scene like this in person I hope you’re able to pull over, get out your camera, and take a few shots to help remember it.