"Sleep" - Tobacco Fields

Up here in New England we have been struggling through the worst winter we've seen in dozens of years. We've had snow followed by severe cold, followed by freezing rain, and sometimes all three have appeared together.

If you're a school-aged kid, it's been great.

The rest of us have been muttering obscenities for weeks.

Last week I took a drive out to the tobacco fields the day after another dozen or so inches of snow fell. The assignment for this week is "Sleep", and I thought that the farms really do sleep during the snowy winter months.

I am fortunate to work in the cigar tobacco business, and the wrapper tobacco grown here in Connecticut is widely considered among the best in the world. The tobacco is grown in the steamy summer months under the cover of special netting that gives the delicate tobacco some important shade from direct sunlight, which can burn the leaves.

Unfortunately, the day was very gray and the light was terribly flat, but here is one of the sleeping tobacco fields. The nets are rolled at the top of those posts.

I love the frozen trees in the background of this photo, but they aren't as crisp as I wanted them to be. I was using my sister's monopod to help keep the camera steady, but I was standing it on top of my car to try and keep the trees from being cut off by the nets.

I'm not happy with the perspective, since it looks like the trees are growing out of the nets, but it was the best I could do at the time.

Because the light was so flat to begin with, I ended up increasing the contrast and changing the photo to B&W. There was so little color that making the monotone be part of the shot seemed to make sense.

To continue with the agricultural lesson, once the tobacco is harvested, the leaves are hung to dry in large barns. Traditionally, these barns are red.

Again, the flat light gave me problems, so I tried to correct the blue tint in the snow, increase the saturation of the red barns, and finally I added some depth to the sky.

I'm really happy with how this one turned out. It's still a little blue, but it's much closer to what I was trying to achieve.

Here are a few more looks at the tobacco fields and barns.

I hope you can tell that I was really trying to work on my composition with this one.

Unfortunately, when I looked at it on the computer, I thought that the barn at the back of the photo looked weird in relation to the barn on the right.

I decided to focus on the lines of the posts instead. I desaturated the photo after increasing the contrast. Then I was able to add some blue to the sky to make up for all those pesky clouds.

I'm unhappy with the lack of focus though. I used the monopod (propped in a snow bank) to keep the camera steady, but I still couldn't get a nice, crisp photo. I'll have to work on that.

Same idea here.

Actually, it's the same spot, only a wider shot of it. I left the barn there this time and faked a blue sky again.

I think that the wider angle is closer to what I was looking for as I drove up to the farm. That is a sleeping tobacco farm.

Finally, I wanted to get a look at the inside of the shade structures.

Those strings hanging down are used to fasten the nets, and some are used to support the tobacco plants as they grow.

I loved the lines of the strings to I cropped the photo to focus on those strings (which were frozen, by the way). For the rest, I tried to saturate the barn a little, and increase the contrast to fight the overwhelming gray.

I think I like it, but again, it's not as crisply in focus as I thought it would be.

Now that I have a tripod (three actually - two that I "borrowed" from my sister and one I bought for myself) I hope to figure out how to get these shots in focus.

This is the end of today's lesson on tobacco farming in the Connecticut Valley. Please join us in the Spring when we cover seedlings and planting...