Top 10 tips for farm photography

Former dairy farmer and top photographer Pauline Rook, whose work is currently in a retrospective at Somerset Rural Life Museum, has provided her top 10 tips for on-farm photography to Farmers Weekly readers.

You can see the exhibition, Top and Soil: Somerset People in the Landscape, at the Glastonbury museum until 25 May.

Pauline’s top 10 tips –

1. Prepare for dust and dirt

Wear old clothes as dogs will jump up and you may have to kneel down and wade through mud. Keep the lens cap on – you should always have one on a camera lens – until the last moment if there is muck or dust flying about. Keep the camera strap around your neck in case of a sudden dog attack – something that’s saved my camera on more than one occasion.

2. Look before you shoot

Look around carefully for what is most interesting about a particular farm. Is it the stock, the buildings, the machines or what is actually going on? Think carefully about what you want to take pictures of before rushing in.

3. Circle your target

Whatever it is you have decided to take a picture of, walk all around it if you can, to see which angle will offer the best composition. You may be very surprised how different things can look from another viewpoint and with the light coming from a different direction.

4. Think background

Backgrounds can be very distracting in a photograph. You may take a picture of a fabulous new tractor only to find that piles of fertiliser bags in the background completely ruins the photograph and you didn’t even see them because you were too busy looking at the tractor. Look all around the frame before pressing the button, working on a tripod will help with this.

5. Animal magic

When photographing animals especially, look for a plain background and try to avoid ‘half-animals’ at the side of the picture. If you are trying to photograph sheep, particularly in a field where they are all nicely arranged, move very slowly into position and don’t get eye contact with them. Look away, just watching where you are going out of the corner of your eye; the second you look at them directly they will run away.

6. Where’s the sun?

The bright sunny days (remember those) of summer are not a good time to take photographs. The contrast between the light and dark areas will be very hard to handle. Bright overcast days are usually the best for most photography. Except, see below.

7. Lighting the landscape

Landscape photography of fields is best done when there is good strong directional lighting. For example, it’s good all winter when the sun is low in the sky and then in summer in the morning and the evening. Cross-lighting with the sun at your side will show up textures in ploughed land and rows and furrows much better than if you have the sun directly behind you. Unsettled weather with dramatic skies and patchy sunlight can make the most interesting photographs of fields. Always be sure to have something interesting in the foreground of landscape pictures, otherwise they can become rather dull.

8. Get inside

Go inside buildings, the lighting will then be from the side, rather than from all directions and this will improve portraits of people especially.

9. Better building

Try to find old buildings on a farm, they tend to make much better backdrops to photographs. If it is possible, move an animal that you want to photograph to somewhere with a plain background (for example, the interesting texture of an old stone wall). You will get a much better picture than filling the background with farmyard clutter. Modern buildings with their strong graphic lines can also offer interesting compositions but beware the sun streaming through Yorkshire boarding – very distracting.

10. Manual work

Try to move away from using the “auto” setting on your camera, go on to manual and experiment until you see what a difference aperture and shutter speed can make to your pictures when you in control and not the camera.