I have selected this image mainly because it is date topical, the composition shows exactly why I had wanted to possess a Nikon 14-24mm wide angle zoom lens for a long time, and it is one of the first images that I took with the lens after my wife bought me a secondhand one in mint condition for a ‘significant’ birthday.
There is an area just North of Dartmoor, between North Tawton, Coldridge and Bow in Devon where come July, a number of long-stalk wheat fields are grown and harvested especially for the straw, which will be used for thatching. (The grain itself is used in flour etc.)
The straw is harvested by a machine called a reaper-binder, (sometimes called a sail-binder), which ties the crop into sheaves. The reaper-binders used here are some 70 years old, and are towed along by tractor, though up until the 1950s they would have been horse-drawn.
The sheaves are laid down by the binder, then gathered up by hand in bunches of ten and stacked up or ‘stooked’ (as in the photograph), to form stooks arranged with 2 central sheaves, and 4 sheaves either side, in such a way as to allow wind to blow through and dry out the corn before thrashing.
Traditionally, the stooks were ‘churched’, which means that they were left long enough to hear the church bells for two or three Sundays before being untied by hand and gathered up. Once gathered up the straw is taken to a barn for thrashing or in previous times would have been stacked up into a rick before thrashing. (I do not know of anywhere local in Devon where traditional ricks are still made.)
This image here is of Ryan Turner, a trainee thatcher, who was working for Tristan Johnson Ltd of Winkleigh, a local company for whom the wheat is grown specifically for thatching material.
I was trying out my news lens for the first time when I took this photograph. I always like to try and capture the stooks in the landscape, as they can make for such an idyllic and timeless English landscape scene – convert such an image to black and white, and you could be looking at images of England from some 80 to 100 years ago, as featured in the classic travel books of writers and photographers such as H.V.Morton, W.A.Poucher, J.Dixon-Scott, Val Doone and S.P.B.Mais.
The image was not posed – Ryan was too busy gathering up sheaves and certainly not stopping for me. I took quite a few images to get this one portrait. I settled for having the lens wide open at 14mm as I wanted to capture all the detail of Ryan and the stook in the foreground, as well as the expanse of the wide open sky and field.
The weather was perfect with blue sky andwhite puffy clouds, with the wide angle perspective creating the effect of drawing the clouds in to the subject, and creating a contrast to the golden-yellow corn and the dry parched red earth of the rich Devon soil. (The soil in many parts of Devon is this rich red colour because of the underlying Permo-Triassic ‘Red Beds’ – iron-rich red muds, shales and sandstones from a time when global temperatures were higher than now and much of Europe was an arid semi-desert environment, with sand dunes, playa lakes, and flash floods, etc.)
The day was bright and sunny, so I was able to use a low ISO of ISO-100, but sufficiently bright for a shutter speed of 1/350 to freeze movement at an aperture of f8 to keep all the foreground sharp. Because Nikon’s 14-24mm lens is not a fisheye lens, the perspective is not too distorted. Had I tried to do this with a longer lens such as my Nikon 24-70mm or a ‘standard’ 50mm lens I would have had to have been further away from the subject and with a narrower field of vision, and so would have lost the effect of the diverging clouds as in the top right hand corner of the image frame. The perspective effect of the diverging clouds and field in the background adds drama to the scene – a vast field with one man working up a sweat with hard toil stacking up the stooks under the hot sun.
I was especially pleased with this image as it embodied exactly the sort of images I wanted to capture, so fully justified the purchase of the lens!