Morning on the Farm

25

I admit that I love farm scenes. I love barns. And I love cows. All of those take me back to the summers I spent with my grandparents in the Shuswap.

Grandma and Grandpa had a working cherry orchard (both we pick and U-pick as well as sales to local produce sales markets), though there were also pears, peaches, apples, plums, and various berries along with a massive vegetable garden and a large alfalfa field.

Granny and Grandad had several alfalfa fields, their own massive vegetable garden, and a few apple and cherry trees for their own consumption/preserving needs. They also had some cattle and chickens.

Thus I love all of these things.

Particularly cows.

I love their quiet curiosity. Their placid nature. They always seem to me to be just watching the world pass by and contemplating everything with calm thought. My grandad taught me to milk a cow when I was very young, and I’ve never forgotten those magical moments with him, in the barn on the farm, the smell of the hay, the calm cow with her tail twitching away the occasional fly that landed on her flank.

Neither sets of grandparents had a red barn, but a red barn somehow epitomizes a farm with cattle to me.

This barn is on my drive into Yarrow on my way to the Cultus Lake Salmon Research Laboratory and I always smile at it and the cattle that inhabit the field around it. But the light was so perfect this morning, and the cattle were in the perfect spot, tucked in the shadow as the morning sun was coming up, hinting at the heat to come.

I drove past initially, thinking “I’ll stop on my way back home“. But that was stupid. In six to eight hours the light would be harsh, the cattle would be elsewhere, I’d be tired, and there would be more traffic to contend with. So I pulled a U-turn at the three way stop and doubled back, then pulled another U-turn and parked across the road. I pulled out my Nikon and reminded myself that I have to make photography a habit, not an afterthought. And that I need to keep practicing if I ever want to take better photos.

So here is my current favourite barn, complete with cows and golden morning sunshine.

This image is three separate photos, at three different exposure levels, layered together so as to not have the cows disappear into the darkness when trying to expose the sky, and to not have the sky blow out to pure white while trying to expose the cows in the shadow of the barn. I haven’t done a lot of high dynamic range images, but this one didn’t come out too badly.