fuji finepix S2 pro
Industrial Prairie
When one thinks of Minnesota or North Dakota, industry usually isn’t the first thought. All you can see over western North Dakota are canyons, rolling hills, and the occasional oil donkey rising and falling as it pumps ‘black gold’ from the Bakken oil fields. Farms and field spread over the flat prairie of eastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota. Quiet county roads carry only a few cars or farm machinery from town to town and field to field. Grain elevators are usually the only buildings higher than an equipment storage shed. City dwellers don’t think ‘industrial’ when they see the prairies. At first glance it looks flat, empty, and very rural.
Running a farm is an industrial operation. Modern tractors are capable of dragging heavy machinery through dense topsoil in swaths thirty feet wide and two feet deep. Combine harvesters cut through thousands of acres of ripened crop and separate the stalks and other foreign material from the grain. Full size semi-tractor trucks haul tons of grain from the fields to terminals where it is loaded into railroad hopper cars for transport to food processing centers or seaports for shipment overseas. The agriculture industry in this region produces soybeans, sugar beets, barley, oats, wheat, potatoes, and corn. All of this must happen during the short growing season before brutally cold winters and blizzards encapsulate the landscape.
The risk is high but the rewards are great. No one can control the weather, pest infestations, market fluctuations, or labor disputes. Different crops require different equipment, moisture and temperature levels, soil quality, and production timing. Agricultural businesses experience production delays from regional flooding, crop disease, drought, excess rainfall, wildfire, and equipment failure. Market price fluctuations make forecasting difficult. Farmers must be skilled businessmen to produce food on large economies of scale. They need to understand the commodity markets and their own production and storage capacities. They have the experience and skill of any industrial plant manager to assure that equipment is properly maintained, capital resources are efficiently utilized, suppliers understand their requirements, and the labor force is trained and ready in sufficient numbers to complete their work on time and on budget from planting to harvest. Farmers need to produce the right mix of crops to reduce their losses should the weather be too cold, too hot, too wet, or too dry, yet provide the greatest yield for the lowest cost to maximize their profit. If commodity prices are too low, they need to sell enough product to satisfy their creditors while storing the rest at the proper moisture and temperature levels until demand improves and commodity prices increase.
Being a film photographer, I need time to harvest my crop, but I brought a digital Fuji Finepix S2 Pro SLR along for those subjects of opportunity. ‘Harvest Ready’ is an image of a Versatile 435 articulated tractor highlighting its two critical features: power and traction. It stands as tall as a two story building and can pull anything from a large cultivator to a sugar beet harvester through knee-deep mud in all kinds of weather. It is a symbol of power and capability. A machine with attitude.
More from my Industrial Prairie assignment will come as I unlock the latent images from exposed film.
Running a farm is an industrial operation. Modern tractors are capable of dragging heavy machinery through dense topsoil in swaths thirty feet wide and two feet deep. Combine harvesters cut through thousands of acres of ripened crop and separate the stalks and other foreign material from the grain. Full size semi-tractor trucks haul tons of grain from the fields to terminals where it is loaded into railroad hopper cars for transport to food processing centers or seaports for shipment overseas. The agriculture industry in this region produces soybeans, sugar beets, barley, oats, wheat, potatoes, and corn. All of this must happen during the short growing season before brutally cold winters and blizzards encapsulate the landscape.
The risk is high but the rewards are great. No one can control the weather, pest infestations, market fluctuations, or labor disputes. Different crops require different equipment, moisture and temperature levels, soil quality, and production timing. Agricultural businesses experience production delays from regional flooding, crop disease, drought, excess rainfall, wildfire, and equipment failure. Market price fluctuations make forecasting difficult. Farmers must be skilled businessmen to produce food on large economies of scale. They need to understand the commodity markets and their own production and storage capacities. They have the experience and skill of any industrial plant manager to assure that equipment is properly maintained, capital resources are efficiently utilized, suppliers understand their requirements, and the labor force is trained and ready in sufficient numbers to complete their work on time and on budget from planting to harvest. Farmers need to produce the right mix of crops to reduce their losses should the weather be too cold, too hot, too wet, or too dry, yet provide the greatest yield for the lowest cost to maximize their profit. If commodity prices are too low, they need to sell enough product to satisfy their creditors while storing the rest at the proper moisture and temperature levels until demand improves and commodity prices increase.
Being a film photographer, I need time to harvest my crop, but I brought a digital Fuji Finepix S2 Pro SLR along for those subjects of opportunity. ‘Harvest Ready’ is an image of a Versatile 435 articulated tractor highlighting its two critical features: power and traction. It stands as tall as a two story building and can pull anything from a large cultivator to a sugar beet harvester through knee-deep mud in all kinds of weather. It is a symbol of power and capability. A machine with attitude.
More from my Industrial Prairie assignment will come as I unlock the latent images from exposed film.
Infrared Anyone?
Following a good suggestion, I decided to add a new gallery to VoV. The images come from a Fuji Finepix S2 Pro digital SLR. I bought this camera a few years ago thinking that I would instantly fall in love with digital photography. Although it is more convenient and much faster than traditional film photography, I seem to revert to the older, yet more familiar, technology. By attaching an R72 filter to the lens, I found that I can get surreal false color images from light recorded in the near infrared spectrum, that is from wavelengths of 720 nanometers or longer. The composition of these images is not my best, but I like how the camera’s CCD sensor interprets the color of full foliage and non-living subjects. Trees and grass appear as snowy masses tinted blue or light purple while steel and concrete appear in copper or blue-grey tones. Of course the images can also be monochrome, but sometimes the unusual colors of digital infrared images are more intriguing.
