That’s right, I just returned from a week on the farm. Literally. Heifer International has several farms in the United States where they teach participants about their goal to end world hunger and poverty. We ate farm-grown vegetables all week, learned about composting and gardening, did daily chores with the animals, and, yes, I took a ton of photographs!
One photography learning I took away from this week is a lesson I should have learned a long time ago: Always keep your camera within arm’s reach because you never when or where the next great photo op will happen! This was so true throughout the week and I was more than happy to tote around my Nikon D300 with the 24-70 f/2.8 lens. This combination allowed me to capture the daily routine and those unexpected surprise moments that popped up now and then. This lens is becoming one of my favorites!
Spending the last five days on a farm brought back memories of long ago for me. I used to work on a dairy farm and some of those remembrances came flooding back to me. The smell of hay and manure carried my mind back many years to tasks and chores of long ago. The sights and smells of the animals and milking a goat were all I needed for a great time! Oh, it didn’t hurt that I had my camera in hand to record these events in a pictorial format. We all know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and this week’s experience on the farm convinced me that some photographs even have the ability to bring back memories from our precious and long-lost past. How many times have you rediscovered an old photograph of a family member or some vacation, which carried your mind right back to a special memory?
I created a photo gallery of the photos I captured on the farm. You can view the gallery here. Take a look and see if your mind goes back to a time when you were on a farm. I think this is just one more added benefit of our passion for photography–the ability to bring back memories of the past with our cameras. There’s nothing quite like it!
Here are four photos from my farm gallery to get you started.
[slideshow]