Agriculture and Photography

When people think of Palm Springs they don't often think farming, but the Coachella Valley is a major player in western states agriculture. I have to admit I felt like I had traveled to another place to photograph a bell pepper harvest, but in reality I was only 20 minutes from my home in Palm Desert. This assignment gave me the chance to take a more photojournalistic approach to my imagery. Being out in the fields at sunrise and hearing the low hum of the tractors as they idle along receiving bucket after bucket of hand picked bell peppers gave me lots of great compositions and the sense of being immersed in an environment. I had fantastic natural light all morning, even at the packing shed where the peppers travel by conveyor to be washed, sorted and packed within minutes (literally less than one hour)of being picked. The following are a few favorite images.

OK that was fun shooting, time to get back to work. Here's a nice report portrait.

This is shot with two tungsten gelled flashes and a WB of 3200K (warms the tones just a bit over the 2950K tungsten balance). The flash for the subject is diffused through a 43" shoot-through umbrella and the background flash is grid-spotted onto the conveyor. The light blue cast in the frame is daylight.