Round hay bales sit in a farm field at the corner of Baldy Road and Bastain Road on the outskirts of Kutztown Pennsylvania on Thursday 11-17-2011.

Nikon D300 with Tamron 28-75mm F2.8 lens, single shot, Aperture Priority mode, F14, ISO 200.

I blended several teture layers from the commercially available texture packs from Distressed Tetures to achieve the painterly look I wanted.

I found this cool old barn along a bend in the road while exploring New Bethel Church Road in Kempton a while back. The mountains in the background are the Appalachian Mountains.

Nikon D7000 with a Tamron 28-300mm F3.6-6.3 LD lens, aperture priority mode, single exposure shot through car windshield @ F11, ISO 200.

I blended several textures from Darkwood67, Distressed Textures and Kim Klassen in order to get the soft, painterly look I was going for.

I passed this horse farm a thousand times before and never noticed all the great lines offered by the white fence line. The farm is located on Route 183 in West Leesport, PA and is currently offered for sale and includes a small pond with a fountain and a very nicely kept farm house.

Nikon D7000 with a Nikon 28-70mm F2.8 AFS lens, manual focus, aperture priority mode, exposure bracketing for three brackets @ F11, ISO 100. HDR and tone map post-processing completed with NIK HDR Efex Pro.

I blended several textures from Darkwood67 and Shadow House Creations and Kim Klassen in order to get the soft, painterly look I was looking for.

This one-room schoolhouse is located on Allemaengel Road in New Tripoli, PA. It sits in a farm field and was converted, at some point, from a school into a storage building for the farmer who’s land the building sits on. The sliding door that the farmer installed on the front is now missing but the rest of the structure seems to be in pretty sound condition. I couldn’t find any information at all about the name of the school or years of operation though the architecture and building materials are consistent with other one-room schools in the area that were built in the 1880-1910 time frame. The Cows seem to like hanging around the school but they don’t really look any smarter for the experience. LOL

I shot this one as a single exposure, hand held. D7000 with a Tamron 28-300mm F3.6-6.3 LD lens, aperture priority mode, F11, 1/60th shutter speed, ISO 100. No HDR processing done on this. I blended several textures from the commercially available texture packs from Distressed Textures and Kim Klassenwhich gave it the slight oil painting look I was going for. Bird brushes also courtesy of Distressed Textures.

I found several Ponies grazing in a field next to the Red Caboose Motel and Restaurant in Strasburg, PA on Sunday. I had to wait about an hour to get one of them lined up with the American flag on the fence and the Amish farm in the background. While I was waiting, a baby Pony kept on coming over and poking his head through the fence wanting me to pet his mane. These are the moments that take you away from the 9 to 5 grind of the work week and allow you to relax and just enjoy life.

D300, aperture priority mode, F8, ISO 200.

I was rummaging through a box of my old camera stuff on Thursday night and I came across an old Tamron 28-300mm F3.5-6.3 LD lens that I had in its original box from when I bought it back in 1999. The last time I remember using it was at least ten years ago. So I decided to throw it on the D7000 Friday afternoon and go driving around the farms and fields looking for interesting farmscapes to shoot. 28-300mm is an interesting range and while the lens is certainly not “fast glass”, it does a nice job for things like street photography or a simple walk around lens. The farm is located on Schochary Road in New Tripoli, PA.

I shot this one as a single exposure, hand held. D7000, aperture priority mode, F11, 1/30th shutter speed, ISO 100. No HDR processing done on this. I blended several textures from the commercially available texture packs from Distressed Textures and also one from Shadow House Creations which gave it a nice painted canvas look I wanted.

This is the old one-room schoolhouse in Perry Township, Berks County, PA. The farmer who currently owns it uses the property to store many of his farm implements and tractors. I got lucky on late Sunday afternoon when I went to shoot it and found that the farmer had parked his John Deere 4430 tractor on the corner of the property. I love a farmer who has compositional asthetics awareness. LOL

Nikon D7000 with Sigma 10-20mm lens, Manual Focus, Aperture priority mode, exposure bracketing for three brackets with 2 stop variance @ F14, ISO 100. HDR and tone map post-processing completed with Nik HDR Efex Pro.

I’m thinking I need to go back over there and re-shoot this on a day with ominous, sweeping clouds and maybe use the Sigma 10mm Fisheye.

I have wanted to shoot this old barn on route 487 in Stillwater Township, Columbia County, PA for a few years now. I was waiting for some interesting sky or cloud formations. Today was the day.

Nikon D300 with a Nikon 28-70mm F2.8 AFS lens, manual focus, aperture priority mode, exposure bracketing for five brackets @ F11, ISO 200. I tried a slightly different approach to the HDR and tone map post processing for this one thanks to a huge collection of tips from Klaus Herrmann and his HDR Cookbook web site and his willingness to share his knowledge on Google Plus. For these bracketed shots, I decided to save them first as 16 bit TIFFs before bringing them into NIK HDR Efex Pro. The theory is that there is more of an opportunity to control the color and eliminate some of the blocking up of the shadow detail as well as take care of any chromatic aberrations if they exist if you open the RAWs in Adobe Camera Raw first and then save them as TIFFs once in Photoshop rather than letting HDR Efex Pro do the RAW conversion during the creation of the single HDR image and tone mapping. I think it made a difference on the shots I have tried it on so far.

This Amish Farmer in Strasburg, PA uses the traditional horse drawn plowing method to till his field, but with a twist. His two Sons ride on the front to provide extra weight for the plow blade and as the horses move the plow every foot and a half or so, they quickly plant a new tobacco plant seedling. The Son on the left separates the seedlings in the tray and hands it to the other Son who drops it in the trench created by the plow blade and covers up the dirt around the seedling. In the Fall you can see the harvested tobacco plants drying in the white corn crib barn across the street. Often times the area farmers will grow a mix of crops including corn, wheat, tobacco, etc.

I applied a series of textures from photos I had shot of stone, dirt and various surfaces with unique texture and blended them in to give this a slight painterly but more of a chalk etching feel in spots.

The Neff Round Barn is one of the most iconic barns in Pennsylvania. It was built in October of 1910 and stands on a farm along side route 45 in Potter Township just outside Centre Hall, PA in Centre County. The barn was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The foundation is of farm quarried limestone and encompasses an area of over 6,000 square feet with an 88 foot diameter. The barn was designed by Calvin R. Neff who owned the farm the barn was built on. The construction of the barn was done by a local carpenter, Aaron Thomas. The structure is sound inside and out and still being used to store hay and farm vehicles, but is no longer being utilized in a full farm operation.

3 bracketed RAW frames @ 1 stop increments. HDR and tone map post processing via NIK HDR Efex Pro version 1.1. I’ve wanted to shoot this barn ever since I saw it on the late master photographer, Fred Yarnell’s web site. Most other photos I have seen of this barn taken in modern times always crop so tightly on the barn itself. I wanted to give a wider composition to give the barn more context for the viewer.