| Photo Award Winner As part of our commitment to professional improvement, The ByLine highlights photos honored by the 2004 AAEA Photo Awards program. This month we highlight the Portrait/Personality category, won by David Lundquist of Cooperative Partners for an image of a farm woman with dairy cattle.
"It never hurts to have a nice-looking subject, and Cris Peterson, who dairy farms with her husband and son in western Wisconsin, fit that bill well. Cris is also a noted author of agricultural books for children, which was the story angle in Partners magazine. (Her latest effort, "Fantastic Farm Machines," will soon be on the shelves and has photography by yours truly. She drafted me). "The photo was taken on a mild late-winter day, and I had arrived at the farm later in the afternoon to take advantage of a low sun in the hazy western sky, a nice starting point for portrait light. I posed Cris in front of their modern dairy building to take advantage of the red color, and had her leaning on some of the gating to give her hands something to do. Cris is natural and comfortable in front of the camera, but giving a subject something to 'interact' with usually helps a pose in my opinion. "It's barely noticeable, but I ticked in just a bit of on-camera flash to brighten her up. I'm normally not a big fan of fill-flash for the very reason that it is difficult to pull off. Often the flash is disconcertingly obvious, too much flash, backgrounds tending to go dark, shadows from bills of caps caused by the flash, etc. So my rule would be that almost always, less is more. Though this was taken with film, another advantage of digital cameras is that the balance between ambient light and flash intensity can be monitored and adjusted." - David Lundquist |
Here are comments
"The photographer created a great portrait out of difficult, flat lighting conditions."
"The subject has a great expression, revealing the mutual engagement between the photographer and the subject."
The 2005 Photo Awards Program was made possible by AAEA through a grant from Monsanto and Smithfield Foods. |
